INTRODUCTION
Liz Garbus’s brilliant documentary Love, Marilyn, which is the definitive word on the most famous icon of film history, described Marilyn Monroe’s enduring, beloved dumb blonde persona as one that she manufactured for own benefit but one by which she also felt imprisoned. The genius of Monroe’s comedy was that she made it look easy, but doing so got in the way of her pursuit of more serious projects (such as her dream to play the Maria Schell part in Richard Brooks’ adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov). Monroe is the most famous example of a potent onscreen persona limiting an actor’s prospects, but she wasn’t the first and she certainly won’t be the last.
Anthony Perkins was another example of an actor who scored big with an iconic role and spent the rest of his career trying to outrun it while, at the same time, falling back on it whenever it meant keeping himself current. He was initially marketed as a teen idol to capitalize on his boyish looks and, likely, being sold as a sexless, cuddly teen also meant that the publicity department didn’t have to work as hard to hide the truth of his sexuality. He entered the cinematic hall of fame, however, when his twitchy, vulnerable and wholly unpredictable Norman Bates debuted on the big screen in the horror film that changed the landscape of cinema forever, 1960’s Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock was notable for finding the dark side of squeaky clean actors (Cary Grant has never been sexier than in Notorious, and James Stewart is more or less a necrophiliac in Vertigo), and one of his greatest coups was taking the boy next door and making you wish you lived a little further down the street.
Perkins gives one of the finest performances of the 1960s as Bates. He’s terrifying and adorable at the same time and pulls it off with barely a whisper of an effort. Had the Academy been as adept at appreciating acting in horror films as they were this past year, he might have earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination, but the awards weren’t in tune with genres yet and it’s incredible that Janet Leigh even made it in there, particularly for a film whose value as great art was under great debate thanks to its content. For the rest of the sixties, the work Perkins turned in varied in substance but would always be compared to this character, playing impish tricksters and mischievous lovers in films that never fully trusted him to be morally reliable. Hollywood was solely interested in turning him into a full-on Bela Lugosi, but Europe beckoned with promises of more and he wisely said yes to opportunities coming his way from across the pond.
By the seventies, however, Perkins was no longer young and cute and audiences didn’t quite know what to do with him. A decade in Europe had killed his box office power and he was relegated to supporting roles. Which with a few exceptions in the years to come, would be his bread and butter until his premature death during the AIDS epidemic on September 12, 1992. After a lifetime of uphill battles, even that wasn’t the last tragedy to befall his family. A day before the tenth anniversary of his death, on September 11, 2001, his wife, Berinthia “Berry” Berenson died aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Their sons, one of them future Longlegs director Oz Perkins, saw both their parents taken by two of the most notable disasters of the century.
Despite being well known to all colleagues and friends as a supporter of social justice rights, Perkins had ambivalent feelings about his own sexuality, and subscribed to the narratives placed on him by a culture that sought to “fix” him. Taking a look at the times he grew up in is to understand why. Congress named homosexuals and communists as enemies of freedom while Perkins was in college and, despite a number of relationships with fellow male students, he was spared when a number of gay men were expelled from Rollins College in Florida (he soon transferred to Columbia, anyway). He frequently talked about his desperation to “straighten” out, fitting himself into a (hopefully) now outdated stereotype of the delicate man raised by an absent father and an overbearing mother. He also (allegedly) told the Selective Service that he was a “practising homosexual” when brought up to the draft.
Anthony Perkins was born on April 4, 1932 in Manhattan to actor Osgood Perkins and his wife, Janet (Rane) Esselstyn, both of whom provided the extremes of the above-mentioned parental archetypes, the former dying when Perkins was five years old, the latter overbearing to the point of allegedly being sexually abusive of her son. Osgood, who could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower, was a successful character actor who didn’t spend much time with his son in the few years he had him, and young Anthony was raised mainly by his mother and a nanny. Janet took a number of jobs in professional theatre, running American Theatre Wing’s Boston Stage Canteen and Delaware’s Robin Hood Theatre among others, and between bouts of rebellious behaviour that got him kicked out of schools and thrown into boarding school, Perkins became interested in pursuing his father’s line of work.
Summer stock in the late forties led to summers spent trying to get jobs in the movies in California, pulled into a screen test as a stand-in after weeks of running errands on the MGM lot. The test was an accident but it landed him a film debut in The Actress by George Cukor, who had known his father. The film was a bomb but Perkins was on his way, following it with a starring role on Broadway in Tea and Sympathy, replacing the original lead John Kerr (who played the part in the eventual film version). A talent scout who saw the play suggested him to William Wyler for his 1956 Friendly Persuasion, and the rest is history. By the following year, Perkins was an Oscar nominee with a fan club.
Read More:
Go to Part Two – The Fifties: Teen Idol
Coming Soon: Part Three – The Sixties: Continential Gentleman
Coming Soon: Part Four – The Seventies: Character Actor
Coming Soon: Part Five – The Last Decade: Reclaiming the Past
