Actress Janet Leigh, whose dozens of starring roles were eclipsed by a single movie moment - the motel shower stabbing scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," has died at the age of 77, a family spokeswoman said on Monday.
Leigh "died peacefully in her home on Sunday afternoon" in Beverly Hills with her husband, Robert Brandt, and her actress daughters, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis, at her side, the spokeswoman said.
Leigh had been battling vasculitis - an inflammation of the blood vessels - for a year, she said.
Leigh's film career started in 1947 after actress Norma Shearer discovered her photograph on a hotel reception desk and recommended her for an MGM studio contract.
She appeared opposite such stars as Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Frank Sinatra, Charlton Heston, James Stewart and ex-husband Tony Curtis in dozens of movies including at least two classics, "The Manchurian Candidate" in 1962 and Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil" in 1958.
But lasting film fame came not from the love interest or damsel in distress roles that the blond actress specialised in more than 50 movies but from a film in which she played a thief on the run.