Janet was an only child of a couple who often moved from town to town. Living in apartments, Janet was a bright child who skipped several grades and finished high school when she was 15. As a lonely child, she would spend much of her time at movie theaters. She was a student, studying music and psychology, at the University of the Pacific until she was "discovered" while visiting her parents in Northern California. Her father was working the desk at a ski resort where her mother worked as a maid. Retired MGM actress Norma Shearer saw a picture of Janet on the front desk and asked if she could borrow it. This led to a screen test at MGM and a starring role in The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947). MGM was looking for a young naive country girl and Janet filled the bill perfectly. She would play the young ingenue in a number of films and work with the leading stars, including, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Orson Welles and Judy Garland. Her career would include a number of successful movies including _'Little Women (1949)_ , Angels in the Outfield (1951), Scaramouche (1952), Houdini (1953), The Black Shield of Falworth (1954) and many others.

Janet would appear in many types of films, from comedies to westerns to musicals to dramas. Of her more than fifty movies, she would be remembered for the forty-five minutes that she was on the screen in the small budget movie Psycho (1960). Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, this 1960 thriller would include the shower scene that would become a film classic. Even though Janet is killed off early in the picture, she would be nominated for an Academy Award and receive a Golden Globe. Her next film would be The Manchurian Candidate (1962) where she would star with Frank Sinatra. For the rest of the decade, her appearances in films would be rare, but she worked with Paul Newman in Harper (1966). In the seventies, she appeared on the small screen in a number of made for Television Movies.

Credit: imdb.com