4. Janet Leigh (Psycho)
For quite a while there, this section said 'Anthony Perkins' in Psycho, for his creepy and ground shaking role of Mama's boy Norman Bates. But then when you look into the making of Psycho, the most shocking and controversial role in it is that of Janet Leigh. The film opens with her in a bra sharing a bed with a man out of wedlock, something that broke convention and the so called 'production code' of the 1950s, but hey, being such a huge star at least survive the picture right? The censors in charge of enforcing the Production Code at the time wrestled with Hitchcock as some of them insisted they could see one of Leigh's breasts. Hitchcock held onto the print for several days, didn't edit it and sent it back to them. Each of the censors reversed their positions: those who had previously seen the breast now did not, and those who had not, now did. The opening scene remained none the less. To then be killed off just shy of half way through was a shocking, boundary breaking moment in cinema history, even for a Hitchcock film. The advertisement of Leigh as the star was enough to sell the lie and when she was murdered quite gruesomely in the shower, the average cinema goer was horrified and shocked by it all.