Anthony Perkins

• 1. Introduction

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  Anthony Perkins was born on the 4th of April 1932 in Manhattan and died on the 12th of September 1992. When Fear Strikes Out reached theaters in 1957, The Hollywood Reporter wrote of his performance: "Every recent young star has been compared to James Dean. From now on the standard is Tony Perkins." Few actors are handed that kind of billing, and fewer still are as uneasy wearing it.

  Paramount Pictures marketed him as a romantic leading man and a heartthrob. Yet most listeners today know him as Norman Bates in Psycho, a role that followed him through three sequels and the rest of his working life. Behind the shy, boyish image stood a man whose private life his own studio tried to manage.

  This documentary asks how a boy raised in the long shadow of an actor father ended up on magazine covers. It asks what the studio wanted from him and what that cost. And it asks what an actor does once a single role threatens to swallow every other.

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• 2. Chasing a Father

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  Osgood Perkins, born in 1892, was an actor who worked so steadily that his son Tony saw him only rarely. A French nanny named Jeanne filled some of the gap, and the boy grew up fluent in French. In a 1983 interview with People magazine, Perkins recalled: "I became abnormally close to my mother; whenever my father came home I was jealous. It was the Oedipal thing in a pronounced form, I loved him but I also wanted him to be dead so I could have her all to myself."

  Osgood died of a heart attack on the 21st of September 1937. The young Perkins took the death as his own doing. He later said: "I was horrified. I assumed that my wanting him to be dead had actually killed him. I prayed and prayed for my father to come back. I remember long nights of crying in bed. For years I nursed the hope that he wasn't really dead. Because I'd see him on film, it was as if he were still alive. He became a mythic being to me, to be dreaded and appeased."

  His mother, Janet Esselstyn, kept close company with an aspiring playwright named Michaela O'Harra. In the same 1983 interview, Perkins said his mother sexually abused him during these years. He said the behavior continued into his adulthood.

  In 1942, when Perkins was ten, the family moved to Boston. His mother used her theatre connections to land a job managing much of the American Theatre Wing's Boston Stage Door Canteen. While she worked, Perkins was often sent to stay with his grandmother, and he began to struggle at his public school. One description of him called him a "gifted drifter."

  His mother sent him to Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, and it went badly. His childhood stutter returned, he avoided sports, and she insisted he play baseball anyway. Two bouts of scarlet fever kept him out for long stretches of his second year. He struck a bargain: better grades would earn him a return to Boston, and he finished in the top third of his class.

  Back in Boston, the absence of his father grew harder to bear, and theatre became the way he stayed connected to him. A family friend who ran a summer stock company let him take small parts. At the Brattleboro Summer Theater in Vermont, he appeared in Junior Miss, Kiss and Tell, and George Washington Slept Here. He also worked the box office for $25 a week and earned his Equity card.

  At Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, he became the class magician and pianist. His popular impression of the actor Roddy McDowall was performed between classes. In 1948 he returned to summer stock at the Robin Hood Theatre in Arden, Delaware, where his mother had found work as a manager. His most notable part that summer was in Sarah Simple, and he also met Charles Williamson, the first boy he was romantically drawn to.

  He graduated in 1950 and enrolled at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. That fall he found little of the community he had known on stage, and his arrival coincided with the Lavender Scare, a period of intense hostility toward gay people. A future children's television host named Fred Rogers let him use his piano. Biographer Charles Winecoff claimed that gay students were expelled and arrested after one was beaten, and that Perkins escaped punishment through his bond with a theater professor. That account rests only on Winecoff's interviews with alumni, and no corroborating evidence has surfaced.

  Whatever the full truth, tension with other students grew until Perkins transferred to Columbia University in New York City. The role he had played at the Robin Hood Theatre that summer, Fred Whitmarsh in a play called Years Ago, was about to change his life.

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• 3. Breakthrough Roles

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  During a summer break from Rollins, Perkins traveled to California to look for film work. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was adapting Years Ago for the screen, so he hung around the studio lot hoping a casting director would notice him. By his own account he spent the summer running errands and delivering food to the studio guards.

  Then came a screen test for the child star Margaret O'Brien. The director needed someone to stand in the background, and a studio worker suggested Perkins. When the director told him to move, he answered back, and that exchange got him noticed. Later that summer he was cast as Fred Whitmarsh in the film, retitled The Actress and released in 1953. His co-stars were Jean Simmons and Spencer Tracy, and the director was George Cukor, a friend of his late father.

  Elia Kazan, another friend of Osgood Perkins, directed the Broadway play Tea and Sympathy. Perkins took over the lead from John Kerr, playing Tom Lee, a college student seen as effeminate who is "fixed" by an encounter with a woman. The play's resolution was homophobic, but it was among the first major Broadway productions to portray homosexuality openly, and it drew a large gay audience. Many judged Perkins better than his predecessor, and Perkins himself later called it one of his most meaningful performances.

  According to Winecoff, Perkins received a draft notice during the run, even though the Korean War had recently ended. He reportedly told the Selective Service that he was a "practicing homosexual" to be ruled unfit. Accounts say the treatment he received left him deeply shaken. His boyfriend at the time reportedly said Perkins worked the whimpering he did afterward into his performance as Tom Lee.

  When the run was ending, the director William Wyler sent his assistant Stuart Millar to scout Broadway for Friendly Persuasion. The film followed a Quaker family during the American Civil War. Millar saw Tea and Sympathy and invited Perkins to audition for Josh Birdwell, the family's eldest son. Perkins was cast soon after, with Dorothy McGuire and Gary Cooper as his on-screen parents.

  Perkins could not drive, so he hitchhiked from the Chateau Marmont hotel to the set, and fan magazines loved the detail. Cooper took the newcomer under his wing and praised him publicly. The two appeared together on the July 1956 cover of Life magazine. Cooper's daughter, Maria Cooper Janis, later suggested her father felt both admiration for the young man's talent and sympathy for the pressures on closeted gay actors.

  Perkins recalled one scene in particular, the moment Josh decides to enlist. Filming began around 9:30 in the morning, and by 1 o'clock union rules forced a lunch break in the middle of it. Wyler urged him to hold onto the feeling. Perkins went to the commissary, ate two cheeseburgers and a malted, and came back to start again. "Well, youth can do anything," he said.

  The film earned him the Golden Globe for Best New Actor and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He had taken the picture over a play called Dancing in the Checkered Shade, and he described the choice as like flipping a coin. That play never reached Broadway.

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• 4. The Matinee Machine

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  Paramount saw early footage from Friendly Persuasion and signed Perkins to a seven-year, semi-exclusive contract. The deal let him keep working on stage. The studio billed him as its last matinee idol and a "fifteen million dollar gamble." By the time he had finished three pictures, Paramount had reportedly put about $15 million behind him before any of them opened.

  The pictures themselves were uneven. Fear Strikes Out told the story of the baseball player Jimmy Piersall, and Perkins found the set hostile and riddled with homophobia. The Lonely Man, a 1957 Western with Jack Palance, was marked by friction between the two stars and by weather delays. The Tin Star, also from 1957, paired him with Henry Fonda, and the two drove out to the set together and grew close. It earned over $1 million and is now regarded as a classic Western. In 1958 Newsweek called Perkins "possibly the most gifted dramatic actor in this country under 30."

  Paramount lined up famous women opposite him. In Desire Under the Elms, Sophia Loren shared her first American screen kiss with him, and she later described him in her 2014 memoir as polite and gentle but restless. Reviews of his performance were largely negative. Despite weighing only 140 pounds, he appeared shirtless in that film and again in Green Mansions with Audrey Hepburn, in which he also sang the title song. He later called Hepburn "wonderful to work with, like a real person, almost a sister."

  On the Beach spent three months filming in Melbourne. Perkins helped Fred Astaire, who was making his dramatic film debut. In a 1983 interview he named co-star Ava Gardner as the first of several actresses who tried to start a romance with him. For Tall Story in 1960, he trained to play a college basketball player opposite Jane Fonda in her screen debut. She credited him with teaching her how to place herself in the frame, and she admitted that she had developed feelings for him.

  The masculine image carried a price. Paramount executives refused to let him play Shell Oil Junior in Some Like It Hot, reportedly because they feared casting a queer actor in women's clothing for most of a film. The part went to Tony Curtis. Oddly, the studio then gave him The Matchmaker, in which his character briefly disguises himself as a woman. Paramount offered him $75,000 for ten weeks, against a reported $25,000 for co-star Shirley MacLaine. He objected to the gap, nothing changed, and their working relationship stayed strained.

  The studio also blocked him from auditioning for the part of Tony in West Side Story, a loss that came alongside others. He had auditioned for the leads in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, both of which went to James Dean. Years later he took over Dean's part in This Angry Age. He was also kept from a biographical film called Dooley by Paramount's refusal to approve its costs. Missing West Side Story did bring one lasting gain, a friendship with its lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

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• 5. Psycho and Exile

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  Alfred Hitchcock told people he had been thinking of Perkins for Norman Bates ever since Friendly Persuasion. Psycho was made on a small budget, and both Perkins and co-star Janet Leigh took reduced salaries. Much of the crew came from Hitchcock's television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The film was a major critical and commercial success. Perkins won Best Actor from the International Board of Motion Picture Reviewers and gained international fame.

  At the same time he was performing in Greenwillow, a Broadway musical by Frank Loesser, who reportedly disliked him for being queer. Critics still praised him, and he earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical. The director George Roy Hill said that Perkins's voice lacked the usual Broadway polish but also lacked its harsher edges. He singled out the solo "Never Will I Marry."

  Psycho's success led to typecasting, so Perkins bought out his Paramount contract and moved to France. His first European film was Goodbye Again, shot in Paris with Ingrid Bergman. The title was his own suggestion, borrowed from one of his father's plays. Bergman reportedly showed romantic interest in him, which he declined. The role won him the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor.

  In 1962 he briefly returned to New York for the short-lived Broadway play Harold. Back in Europe he starred in Phaedra with Melina Mercouri, who found him both attractive and elusive on screen. He then made Five Miles to Midnight, his second film with Sophia Loren, which he joined only after she replaced Jeanne Moreau in the cast.

  Orson Welles chose him personally for The Trial, and Perkins said Welles told him that if he did not make the film, neither would Welles. Perkins admired the director enough to carry a tape recorder in his coat for weeks, planning a book. He dropped the idea, fearing it might offend. Welles later said he wished Perkins had written it. Welles also said he had done Perkins "a great disservice" and called him "one of the best actors we have." Welles insisted that "The Trial is the best film I have ever made." The two would work together four times.

  The French years also brought Une ravissante idiote, which made him the first American actor to play Brigitte Bardot's romantic partner. He later said she was his least favorite co-star. After The Fool Killer, shot in Mexico, he made a cameo in Is Paris Burning? with a screenplay by his friend Gore Vidal. In 1966, while he was still living in France, Stephen Sondheim wrote the television musical Evening Primrose with Perkins in the lead.

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• 6. Craft and Image

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  In a 1958 interview with Holiday magazine, Perkins named Marlon Brando's work in On the Waterfront as the performance that influenced him most. He said he wanted to convey the maximum "with the simplest, barest means." He also admired the originality of James Dean and remained a lifelong member of the Actors Studio, which both Brando and Dean had attended. Winecoff dismissed the idea that Perkins was a Method actor, placing him between his father's outward-in style and the newer, more organic one. In his early years he took advice from experienced co-stars, above all Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda.

  Perkins rarely discussed his technique. The actress Norma Moore recalled him before the breakdown scene in Fear Strikes Out as intent and nervous, pacing and shaking his hands. Director Robert Mulligan said he was "riding on instinct, very giving and very trusting and very brave." His friend George Roy Hill, recalling Look Homeward, Angel, said he "had no theories to get in his way." Turner Classic Movies later praised his gift for making mental instability disturbing, moving and darkly funny at once.

  On Broadway in 1957 he played Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel, with Jo Van Fleet as his mother, and he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. His dressing room sat far from the stage, so cast members set up obstacles backstage to test whether he would make his cues. He always did. On his final night he was met with a sign reading "We love you, Tony!"

  The public persona was shy and awkward. Jean Simmons remembered him as gawky, with sleeves too short. In 1957 Photoplay called him a "barefoot boy with cheek." He fed the image himself, telling McCall's: "I'm not really suited to be a movie star. I have no confidence in myself." On the game show What's My Line?, he used the Australian accent from On the Beach and said the term movie star implied a glamor he believed he lacked.

  Not everyone bought it. His Tea and Sympathy colleague Alan Sues thought the suffering was projected, not felt. Tab Hunter, in his 2005 memoir, wondered how much of the sheepish appeal was genuine and how much was calculated. Even so, Hunter believed Paramount's pressure over his sexuality helped make Perkins as brooding as he was. The gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper championed him, and Hopper reportedly all but called him her adopted son in print.

  His looks needed no manufacturing. Friend Gwen Davis said that at twenty-four he was already Dorian Gray. Melina Mercouri said he was the most intelligent and the most beautiful actor she had worked with.

  A pop career fed the fan frenzy. In 1957 and 1958 he released three albums and several singles as Tony Perkins, on Epic and RCA Victor. His single "Moon-Light Swim" reached number 24 on the Billboard Hot 100, and "The Prettiest Girl in School" caught on in Australia. Many songs dealt with forbidden romances. Two, that single and "When School Starts Again Next Year," said the girl was still in school. They arrived just before Tall Story, in which he played a college student.

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• 7. A Private Life

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  Tab Hunter said he met Perkins at the Chateau Marmont in 1956, during the filming of Friendly Persuasion. Hunter went public about the relationship in his 2005 autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential. Their relationship lasted about four years and included a stay at a private villa in Rome in March 1957 and an appearance together on Jukebox Jury that May. Early on, Perkins told Hunter he had been cast in Fear Strikes Out, a part Hunter had played on television and hoped to repeat on film. Hunter said the relationship carried on despite the disappointment.

  Paramount president Barney Balaban reportedly objected to Perkins's homosexuality and to Hunter. By multiple accounts the studio pressed Perkins to end it and urged him to undergo conversion therapy. Hunter said the studio asked the two to stop seeing each other. Perkins held out until about 1959, after which the studio's efforts to separate them reportedly succeeded. That separation is often cited as a reason he bought out his contract, as Hunter had done at Warner Bros.

  In 1971 Perkins ended a seven-year relationship with the dancer Grover Dale. Friends Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin steered him to the psychologist Mildred Newman, whose self-help book How to Be Your Own Best Friend was becoming a bestseller. He saw her up to three times a week and became one of her best-known celebrity supporters. In her book she wrote that people who truly wanted to change their sexual orientation had "a very good chance" of doing so.

  Perkins called Newman "a crusader for a wider road, for choice and limitlessness," but his accounts of the sessions were messier. He described crying during exercises in which she asked him to imagine encounters with women. He also remembered "knockdown arguments" over her focus on women. After his death, Sondheim called her methods "completely unethical and a danger to humanity." Hunter said Perkins had his first heterosexual experience around this time, at 39, with the actress Victoria Principal.

  The photographer and actress Berry Berenson entered his life in 1972. Accounts differ on whether they met at a Manhattan party or on the set of Play It as It Lays. She was engaged to the artist Richard Bernstein at the time. Bernstein told her Perkins was gay, and she answered that Perkins was seeing Newman and wanted to live as a heterosexual. She ended the engagement that day.

  They married on the 9th of August 1973. Perkins was 41, and Berenson was 25 and three months pregnant. The actress Venetia Stevenson was shocked, since many people had assumed Perkins was gay. Their son Oz, an actor and director, was born in 1974, followed by the musician Elvis in 1976. Berenson died in 2001 on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  In a 1999 documentary, the director Sidney Lumet recalled Perkins openly calling himself homosexual and saying he had moved past that phase. In a 2024 interview with People, Oz Perkins described growing up knowing his father was a closeted "gay or bisexual man." He said his mother shielded the boys from that side of their father's life and that he does not resent her for it. The family dynamic, he said, helped inspire his film Longlegs.

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• 8. A Second Act

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  Pretty Poison in 1968 was Perkins's first Hollywood film since Psycho. He played Dennis Pitt, a man on parole from a psychiatric institution, opposite Tuesday Weld. Perkins and Weld had dated in the early 1960s, and their on-set manner was reportedly cool but professional. The film flopped at first, and Weld later called it her least favorite, but it grew into a cult favorite.

  In 1970 he took a minor part in WUSA and a supporting role in Catch-22, which together brought a nomination from the National Society of Film Critics. That same year he directed and acted in the Off-Broadway play Steambath. Play It as It Lays in 1972 reunited him with Weld, who won a Golden Globe. Perkins later called his own work in it his best.

  Sondheim and Perkins co-wrote The Last of Sheila in 1973, directed by Herbert Ross. It grew out of games the two had invented. A film producer invites wealthy acquaintances onto a yacht to find out which of them killed his wife, and each guest holds a secret drawn from real gossip. The film was a commercial success and won them the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. Perkins turned down the villain, Clinton, believing it too like his earlier parts, and James Coburn played it. A script for The Chorus Girl Murder Case was reportedly finished by November 1979 but never produced. A 75-page treatment for the television series Crime and Variations, submitted in October 1984, also went nowhere. He had earlier turned down the lead in Sondheim's musical Company, citing scheduling conflicts and later anxiety over the long commitment.

  In 1974 he joined Murder on the Orient Express, reuniting with Ingrid Bergman and Martin Balsam. That same year he replaced Anthony Hopkins in Equus on Broadway, playing the psychiatrist to strong acclaim. In 1976 he hosted an episode of NBC's Saturday Night and thanked the audience for seeing "the real Tony Perkins." The show included a sketch called "Norman Bates's School for Motel Management." In 1978 he played the husband of Berry Berenson's character in Remember My Name. Also that year he played Mary Tyler Moore's husband in First, You Cry, which Saturday Night Live parodied in 1979, drawing over 200 phone calls and 300 letters of complaint.

  The Psycho sequels came next. Psycho II arrived in 1983 and was a commercial success, and that year he starred in the mini-series For the Term of his Natural Life in Australia. He starred in and directed Psycho III in 1986, earning a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actor. When it did less well than its predecessors, his confidence suffered. In 1988 he directed the comedy Lucky Stiff, which he did not appear in and which became a cult film. He also made a pilot called The Ghost Writer, hoping to move toward comedy, but it was not picked up.

  During production of Psycho IV: The Beginning in 1990, Perkins learned he was HIV-positive. Between 1990 and 1992 he appeared in six television productions and hosted the horror anthology Chillers. He died on the 12th of September 1992 from AIDS-related causes. His final role, in the NBC television film In the Deep Woods, aired a month later.

  In the early 1990s he had agreed to voice a dentist named Dr. Wolfe in The Simpsons episode "Last Exit to Springfield." He died before recording it, and Hank Azaria voiced the part instead.

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