What Was Janet Leigh's Net Worth?
Janet Leigh was an American actress, singer, dancer, and author who had a net worth of $12 million at the time of her death. That's the same as around $20 million in today's dollars.
Janet Leigh was best known for her Academy Award-nominated performance as Marion Crane in 1960 film "Psycho." Leigh had more than 80 acting credits to her name, including the films "Little Women" (1949), "Holiday Affair" (1949), "Angels in the Outfield" (1951), "Prince Valiant" (1954), "Touch of Evil" (1958), "Pepe" (1960), "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962), "Bye Bye Birdie" (1963), and "The Fog" (1980) and the television series "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." (1966), "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" (1971–1972), "Fantasy Island" (1979; 1982), and "The Love Boat" (1978–1985). She also appeared in the 1998 horror film "Halloween H20: 20 Years Later" alongside her real-life daughter Jamie Lee Curtis. Janet made her Broadway debut in a 1975 production of "Murder Among Friends." She also published four books: "There Really Was a Hollywood" (1984), "Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller" (1995), "House of Destiny" (1996), and "The Dream Factory" (2002). Leigh passed away on October 3, 2004, at the age of 77 from vasculitis.
Early Life
Janet Leigh was born Jeanette Helen Morrison on July 6, 1927, in Merced, California. She was the daughter of Frederick Robert Morrison and Helen Lita Westergaard. Her maternal grandparents emigrated from Denmark, and her father's ancestry was German and Scots-Irish. When Janet was an infant, her family moved to Stockton, California, where they lived in poverty. Frederick was employed at a factory, and after the Great Depression, he worked additional jobs. Leigh grew up in a Presbyterian household, and she sang in the church choir during her youth. In the early 1940s, Frederick's father became terminally ill, and the family returned to Merced and moved into the home of Janet's grandparents. Leigh attended Stockton's Weber Grammar School and Stockton High School, graduating at the age of 16. After high school, she briefly attended Stockton College, then she majored in psychology and music at the College of the Pacific. As a college student, Janet was a member of the Alpha Theta Tau sorority and the school's a cappella choir. She left college before earning her degree in order to pursue an acting career, but in 1947, she began taking night classes at the University of Southern California.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Career
In 1946, Leigh's parents were working at the Sugar Bowl ski resort in the Sierra Nevada mountains. While vacationing there, actress Norma Shearer saw a photo of Janet in the resort lobby, and when she returned to Los Angeles, she showed the photo to Lew Wasserman, a talent agent at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This led to Leigh being called in for a screen test with actress Selena Royle, and Wasserman subsequently negotiated a contract for Janet. Her first film was 1947's "The Romance of Rosy Ridge," and she followed it with "If Winter Comes" (1947), "Hills of Home" (1948), "Words and Music" (1948), "Act of Violence" (1949), "Little Women" (1949), "The Red Danube" (1949), "The Doctor and the Girl" (1949), "That Forsyte Woman" (1949), and "Holiday Affair" (1949). In the '50s, Leigh appeared in films such as "Angels in the Outfield" (1951), "Two Tickets to Broadway" (1951), "Scaramouche" (1952), "Houdini" (1953), "Prince Valiant" (1954), "My Sister Eileen" (1955), "Safari" (1956), "Touch of Evil" (1958), and "The Perfect Furlough" (1958). In 1960, she starred as Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," which earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination. Next, she appeared in the films "Pepe" (1960), "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962), "Bye Bye Birdie" (1963), "Harper" (1966), "An American Dream" (1966), "Grand Slam" (1967), and "Hello Down There" (1969) and guest-starred on "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." (1966) and "The Red Skelton Show" (1966; 1969).
In the 1970's, Janet began focusing more on television than movies, guest-starring on "The Virginian" (1970), "The Name of the Game" (1970), "Love Story" (1973), "Columbo" (1975), "The Love Boat" (1978), and "Fantasy Island" (1979) and starring in the TV movies "House on Greenapple Road" (1970), "The Deadly Dream" (1971), "Murdock's Gang" (1973), "Murder at the World Series" (1977), "Telethon" (1977), and "Mirror, Mirror" (1979). That decade, she appeared in just three feature films: "One Is a Lonely Number" (1972), "Night of the Lepus" (1972), and "Boardwalk" (1979). In the '80s, Leigh played Kathy Williams in the John Carpenter-directed supernatural horror film "The Fog" and guest-starred on "Tales of the Unexpected" (1982), "Matt Houston" (1982), "Starman" (1986), "Murder, She Wrote" (1987), and "The Twilight Zone" (1989). She guest-starred on "Touched by an Angel" in 1997, and the following year, she played Norma Watson in "Halloween H20: 20 Years Later" alongside her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis. Janet appeared in the 1999 TV movie "In My Sister's Shadow" and guest-starred in a 2001 episode of "Family Law," and her final film, "Bad Girls from Valley High," was posthumously released in 2005.
(Photo by Richard C. Miller/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images)
Personal Life
When Janet was 15, she eloped with 18-year-old John Kenneth Carlisle on August 1, 1942. Five months later, their marriage was annulled. When she was in college, Leigh met U.S. Navy sailor Stanley Reames, who was attending a local V-12 Program, and they married on October 6, 1945; Janet was 18 years old at the time. That marriage ended in divorce in July 1948.
Leigh wed actor Tony Curtis on June 4, 1951, and they welcomed daughters Kelly (born June 17, 1956) and Jamie Lee (born November 22, 1958) together before divorcing in September 1962. Both Janet and Tony were nominated for Academy Awards, and Jamie Lee Curtis won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" in 2023. Leigh married stockbroker Robert Brandt on September 15, 1962, and they remained together until her death in October 2004. Janet was a lifelong Democrat, and she supported John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the presidential elections of 1960 and 1964, respectively. She was a member of the Motion Picture and Television Foundation's board of directors; the foundation "supports working and retired members of the entertainment community with a safety net of health and social services, including temporary financial assistance, case management, and residential living."
Death
On October 3, 2004, Leigh died at her Beverly Hills home at the age of 77 after a long battle with vasculitis. Her husband, Robert Brandt, and her daughters, Jamie Lee and Kelly, were at her side when she passed away. Janet was cremated, and her ashes were entombed at L.A.'s Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in the Garden of Serenity section. Her plaque has her listed as "Janet Leigh Brandt," and Robert was laid to rest with her in 2009.
Real Estate
In October 1976, Janet paid $357,000 (around $2 million in today's dollars) for a mansion in Beverly Hills. Her estate sold the estate in August 2010 for $2.8 million. After a major renovation, today this home is estimated to be worth close to $20 million.
Awards and Nominations
In 1961, Leigh received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for "Psycho." She earned a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Laurel Award nomination for Top Female Supporting Performance for the film as well. Janet also received Laurel Award nominations for Top Female Comedy Performance for "Who Was That Lady?" (1960) and Top Female Star (1961) and won the award for Top Female Comedy Performance for "Pepe (1961). She earned Photoplay Award nominations for Favorite Female Star in 1963 and Most Popular Female Star in 1966, and she was honored with the Silver Medallion Award at the 1984 Telluride Film Festival and the Eyegore Award at the 1998 Eyegore Awards. In 1960, Leigh received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the "Motion Picture" categories. A few months before her death in 2004, Janet's alma mater, the University of the Pacific, awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts. In 2010, the school named the Janet Leigh Theatre after her as "a tribute to her life and career in the Stockton region as well as her magnificent contributions to the Hollywood film industry as an actress, wife, mother and humanitarian." In October 2006, her daughters, Jamie Lee and Kelly, unveiled a bronze plaque of Janet in her hometown, Stockton, California. The statue is located downtown, next to what is now known as Janet Leigh Plaza. In the town of Sun Valley, Idaho, where Leigh had a second home for more than three decades, a ski trail at Sun Valley Resort's Bald Mountain was named Leigh Lane in her honor.
