Joseph Stefano

Screenwriter who changed the plot of Hitchcock's Psycho
Joseph Stefano. Photograph: David Livingston/Getty Images
Joseph Stefano, screenwriter. Photograph: David Livingston
Though the contribution to the classic 1960 film Psycho made by its director, Alfred Hitchcock, and its stars, Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins, is widely recognised, the work on the movie by screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who has died aged 84, is often neglected.

When Stefano met Hitchcock to discuss the script of Psycho, he confessed to having a problem with the material; principally, he disliked the character of Norman Bates. In Robert Bloch's 1959 novel, Bates is plump, balding, bespectacled and 40 years old. "I really could not get involved with a man in his 40s who is drunk and peeps through holes," reflected Stefano. "The other problem was that there was a horrendous murder of a stranger I didn't care about either. I just kept saying to Hitch, 'I wish I knew this girl. I wish Norman were somebody else."'

Consequently, Stefano suggested that the screenplay begin with the character of Marion Crane, who steals $40,000 from her Phoenix, Arizona, employer to begin a new life with her lover but is murdered after stopping at the Bates motel. "Audiences would be sucked into a character who did something wrong but was really a good person," Stefano said. "They would feel as if they, not Marion, had stolen the money. When she dies, the audience would be the victim. With so much early emphasis on Marion, no one dreams she'll get killed. Killing the leading lady (Janet Leigh) in the first 20 minutes had never been done before."

As to the writer's qualms about the central male character, Hitchcock pacified Stefano by asking, "How would you feel if Norman were played by Anthony Perkins?" Stefano was delighted. "I suddenly saw a tender young man you could feel incredibly sorry for," he recalled. "I could really rope in an audience with someone like him." Hitchcock's motives in suggesting the lean, lanky and boyish-looking 28-year-old Perkins were not wholly artistic, though he enjoyed the idea of evil disguised as innocence. He knew that the actor owed Paramount a film under an old contract and could be hired relatively cheaply - for $40,000, the same amount that Marion stole.

Coincidentally, both Stefano and Perkins were in psychotherapy when they were hired by Hitchcock. A weirder coincidence was that Stefano had no idea that Perkins' father had died of a heart attack when his son was five, the same age as Norman at his father's death. Nor was Stefano aware of Perkins' intensely close relationship with his widowed mother.

Stefano was interested in how a formidable and over-protective mother could turn Norman Bates into a killer. So he wrote a scene between the adolescent Norman and his mother that was never intended to be shot. In it, the pair are larking about on the floor. Suddenly, Mrs Bates discovers that her son has an erection and her joy turns to hysterical anger. Screaming that he must forget that he has such a disgusting part of the body, she pulls a dress over his head, smears his face with lipstick and locks him in a closet.

Thirty years later, Stefano was able to include the scene in the flashback to Norman's adolescence in the telefilm Psycho IV, The Beginning (1990), when the mother tells her son, "I should have killed you in my womb. You sure as hell nearly killed me getting out of it." Again Perkins portrayed the adult Norman, who confesses matricide to a radio host. "How did you kill your mother?" he is asked. "Slowly," he replies.

Stefano, who was born in Philadelphia, the son of a tailor, drew on his childhood memories for his first solo screenplay, The Black Orchid (1959), and for his last, Two Bits (1995). The former, written under the influence of Hollywood's new realism, was directed by Martin Ritt and starred Anthony Quinn as a widower attempting to overcome his children's opposition to his marrying a gangster's widow (Sophia Loren). The latter was a rites of passage drama about a young boy growing up in Philadelphia during the depression.

In his late teens, Stefano took himself off to New York where, under the name of Jerry Stevens, he sang, danced and played the piano in Greenwich Village clubs, writing his own material. He then began to write radio scripts, songs for the Sunday-night variety show Ted Mack's Family Hour (1951), and jingles for Ford cars. He started in films as a co-writer on Anna of Brooklyn (aka Fast and Sexy, 1958), an Italian production featuring Gina Lollobrigida as a wealthy widow in search of a husband. This led to the Sophia Loren movie and indirectly to Hitchcock, who was dissatisfied with the first screen treatment of Psycho prepared by James P Cavanagh and who was recommended to try Stefano by his agency, MCA.

"I think doing the screenplay for Psycho has done me more harm than good," Stefano once observed. "Through the years it made it very difficult for me to get some of the other kinds of pictures that I would have liked to have gone on to." In the event, he followed Psycho with The Naked Edge (1961), a tortuous thriller set in London that tries to convince audiences that Gary Cooper (in his last role) is a murderer.

Eye of the Cat (1969) had a young heir (Michael Sarazin) plotting to kill his wheelchair-bound aunt (Eleanor Parker), but hampered by the fact that he is terrified of cats and she owns dozens of them. Futz (1969), Stefano's only comedy, involved a man in love with a pig. At the same time, on the more positive side, Stefano became supervisory writer and producer on the US television series The Outer Limits (1963-65), initially a straightforward science-fiction show which, according to the film writer Steve Biorowski, Stefano "turned into gothic horror, with heavy Freudian undertones" - a description that could equally be applied to Psycho.

Stefano is survived by his wife of 53 years and a son.

· Joseph Stefano, screenwriter, born May 5 1922; died August 25 2006

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