Anthony Perkins

Norman Bates ate the career, and it is worth remembering how much career there was first. Perkins acted in summer stock as a teenager and had already worked in film by the time Broadway took him: The Actress in 1953, then Tea and Sympathy on stage the same year, which is where the acclaim started. Hollywood spent the rest of the decade casting him as the sensitive young man, in Friendly Persuasion (1956), The Tin Star (1957), Desire Under the Elms (1958), Green Mansions (1959) and On the Beach (1959). The awards we hold for him are a Golden Globe as new star of the year and a best actor prize at Cannes.

Then Psycho (1960), and one of the few performances that permanently changed what an audience could be asked to feel. Bates works because Perkins plays courtesy as a symptom: the stammer, the apologies, the fussing over a guest. He is likeable, and the likeability is the trap.

The cost was total. He spent the sixties abroad in parts that pushed back, notably Josef K. in The Trial (1962) and Dennis Pitt in Pretty Poison (1968), and the seventies in ensembles: Catch-22 (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Javert in a 1978 Les Miserables. Read the character names and the typecasting is visible in the paperwork alone, a chaplain, two different reverends, a doctor with a second identity in Edge of Sanity (1989). He went back to Bates three more times, in 1983, 1986 and 1990. Perkins died in 1992, with a private detective in a small thriller among his last credits here.