Janet Leigh

Jeanette Morrison was working-class Stockton until Norma Shearer spotted her at 18 and landed her an MGM contract. Through the late '40s and early '50s she cycled through dramas, Westerns, swashbucklers - solid studio work, nothing that stuck. She married Tony Curtis in 1951, left MGM in '54, and kept moving: Touch of Evil with Welles in '58, then the call from Hitchcock. Psycho arrived in 1960 and turned her into something else entirely. Marion Crane's death in that shower - brutal, brief, unforgettable - won her a Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination, and permanent scream queen status. She divorced Curtis in '62, remarried, worked steadily but never escaped that scene. Decades later she was still playing horror, eventually alongside her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis. She wrote four books, co-ran a production company, and died of vasculitis in 2004 at 77 - fifty-eight years after Norma Shearer changed her life, forty-four after Hitchcock defined it.