JANET LEIGH

By RICHARD CORLISS

DIED. JANET LEIGH, 77, coolly seductive Hollywood star, who earned immortality as the cinema's prime slasher victim in Hitchcock's Psycho; of vasculitis; in Beverly Hills, Calif. She could have settled for being Tony Curtis' wife (for 11 years) and Jamie Lee's mother. But Leigh had a gaze as alert and sexy as any in movies. It bored into Frank Sinatra's frazzled psyche in The Manchurian Candidate; mixed fear and fire as a captive in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Even after she'd been killed in the Psycho shower (a model doubled her in some shots), Leigh's unblinking eye held the viewer's. Decades later, it still does. --By Richard Corliss