His career declined in the '80s, but Norman Bates once again rescued him. Then, too, he sleepwalked through some big, boring "entertainments" in the '70s, such as "The Last of Sheila" and "Murder on the Orient Express." In "Phaedra," a modern retelling of a tragic Greek myth, he was self-destructive and out of control in the superb and vastly underrated "Pretty Poison" he was a small-time faux psycho who wilts and ultimately is destroyed when he comes under the spell of the real thing, as chillingly portrayed by Tuesday Weld. This nudged him into the ironic part of his career, where he played the same type, though now shaded off toward dementia or malice. Later in life, he married the photographer Berry Berenson and they had two sons, Osgood, now 18, and Elvis, 16.įor better or worse, after "Psycho" it was impossible for Perkins to return to the earnest juveniles he'd played before: It was as if there was too much evil wisdom lurking behind those sensitive eyes for them to ever be entirely trustworthy again. It was a tormenting relationship, so much so that he later confessed he was unable to have sexual relations with a woman until his late 30s. He grew, as he stated, "abnormally attached" to his mother. In his private life, Perkins later revealed, he was himself the creation of such an eternal drama: His father was a frequently absent stage and film actor, named Osgood, who died unexpectedly when the boy was 5. ![]() ![]() But the problem of the mother is an eternal dramatic idea - it always seems to work in plays and movies." "Obviously Norman suffers from his condition at a melodramatic excess. "Norman's problem with his mother - every man and most women have had some sort of a knotty situation with their mothers - is such a universal condition," Perkins reflected in 1986.
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