Anthony Perkins and the double life Norman Bates never let him leave

Anthony Perkins

Photo: Unknown (Paramount Pictures) / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 4, 1932 Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
Died	September 12, 1992 (60)
Occupation	Actor, film director and screenwriter
Known for	Psycho, Murder on the Orient Express, The Trial
Awards	Cannes Film Festival · Golden Globe · David di Donatello · Edgar · Donostia · Theatre World

Anthony Perkins spent the second half of his career trying to leave the Bates Motel and kept checking back in. Alfred Hitchcock cast him as Norman Bates because he looked like the last man anyone would suspect: a lanky, stammering, eager-to-please young actor whom Paramount had been selling to teenage girls as its final matinee idol. The trick worked so well that audiences never gave the face back. What lifts Perkins above a horror footnote is how closely the part shadowed the man. The actor who played cinema’s most famous divided self was living a divided life of his own.

The split started early. His father, the stage actor Osgood Perkins, was mostly an absence and then, when Tony was five, a death. Perkins later told People magazine that he had wished his father gone so he could have his mother to himself, and for years believed the wish had done the killing. He grew up in Manhattan and then Boston, raised by a mother whose affection, he said in the same interview, was physically invasive. He found his way back to the dead man through the theatre, spending teenage summers in stock companies in Vermont and Delaware. At Rollins College in Florida, one of the few people who made him feel at home was a student named Fred Rogers, who let him use his piano.

Hollywood noticed him before he had finished his degree. Born in Manhattan on 4 April 1932, he was 21 when George Cukor, a friend of his father’s, gave him a small part opposite Spencer Tracy in The Actress (1953), and Elia Kazan put him on Broadway in Tea and Sympathy in 1954, as a schoolboy the other boys suspect of being homosexual. William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956), with Gary Cooper as his father, brought an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor and a shared Golden Globe as new star of the year. Paramount signed him to a seven-year contract, cast him as the troubled baseball player Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out (1957) and put out pop records under the name Tony Perkins.

The studio had a problem it would not say out loud. Perkins was in a relationship with Tab Hunter, the blond heartthrob under contract at Warner Bros., and by several accounts Paramount’s president, Barney Balaban, pressed him to end it. Hunter only confirmed the affair decades later, in his memoir Tab Hunter Confidential.

Then came Psycho (1960). Robert Bloch’s novel describes Norman Bates as middle-aged, heavy and unappealing. Hitchcock wanted the reverse, and he let Perkins shape the character, accepting many of his suggestions on set. The performance made him famous in a way no contract could undo. It also fixed him, in the eyes of casting directors, as permanently strange.

His answer was to leave. Fluent in French since a childhood nanny taught him, Perkins moved to France and built a second career there. Anatole Litvak’s Goodbye Again (1961), adapted from Françoise Sagan and made opposite Ingrid Bergman, won him the best actor prize at Cannes and a David di Donatello. He played the doomed stepson in Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962) and Josef K. in Orson Welles‘s The Trial (1962), a film Welles said he would not make without him. The reviews for Perkins were harsh, and Welles took the blame publicly, calling him a superlative actor and saying he had done him a great disservice.

Back in the United States he moved into character work, some of it sharp: the young man just out of a psychiatric institution who falls for Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison (1968), the chaplain in Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 (1970), the nervous secretary in Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974). His most surprising credit sits behind the camera. With his friend Stephen Sondheim, a fellow puzzle obsessive, he wrote The Last of Sheila (1973), a yacht-bound whodunit built from the party games the two devised. It won the Edgar Award for best motion picture screenplay, and Rian Johnson has named it as an influence on Knives Out.

This is where the tidy version of his life comes apart. In 1971, after the end of a seven-year relationship with the dancer Grover Dale, Perkins began therapy with Mildred Newman, a bestselling self-help author whose sessions steered him towards women. Two years later he married the photographer and model Berry Berenson, and they had two sons, Osgood and Elvis. Sondheim, after Perkins died, called Newman completely unethical and a danger to humanity. Yet the family’s account refuses a clean verdict. Perkins described married life as calmer and more ordinary, Berenson stayed until the end, and Osgood has spoken of growing up aware that his father was a closeted gay or bisexual man living a double life. Every retelling since has had to choose which of those truths to lead with.

Norman never let go, and eventually Perkins stopped fighting him. Psycho II (1983) was a commercial success, with Osgood playing Norman as a boy. Perkins directed Psycho III (1986) himself, saying he had lived with the story, and sometimes tried to live it down, for more than twenty years. In between he played a deranged street preacher stalking Kathleen Turner in Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984), later a cult item.

In 1990, after the National Enquirer claimed he was HIV-positive, he took a test while making Psycho IV: The Beginning and learned that he was. He kept the diagnosis private for two years, checking into hospitals under false names and working almost to the end. Anthony Perkins died at home in Los Angeles on 12 September 1992, aged 60, of AIDS-related pneumonia. In a statement prepared before his death, he wrote that the people he had met in the world of AIDS had taught him more about love and human understanding than the cutthroat, competitive world in which he had spent his life. Nine years later, Berry Berenson was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 on 11 September 2001.

The argument over who he was has not closed. Netflix‘s Monster: The Ed Gein Story, released in October 2025, cast Joey Pollari as Perkins and put his sexuality at the centre of the portrait; Osgood objected and refused to watch it. Osgood Perkins, now the director of Longlegs, has a new horror film, The Young People, due from Neon later this year.

Watch Psycho today and the casting looks less like a gamble against type than a fit nobody could name aloud at the time: a polite young man, very good at hiding, chatting about his mother while something else moves behind his face. Perkins was asked for three decades whether he was Norman. The question his films still put to an audience is less comfortable: how much of the charm we pay to watch is the work of concealment.

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Tags: actors, American cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho, Anthony Perkins, Stephen Sondheim

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