When it's good when, for example, he's describing Orson Welles directing his subject in the film of Kafka's The Trial "You are pinned to the wall like a thumbtack. You are like a sick moth, and the lines of Tony's back obediently shrink into a thin, dusty shape", or recounting the story of how Perkins, while shooting Crimes of Passion, was ordained a Minister of the Universal Life Church so that he could marry director Ken Russell in a ceremony on the Queen Mary this biography is very, very good. And when it's bad when Bergan goes into overdrive on his "Anthony Perkins was Norman Bates" hobby horse it's a pain in the neck. It stands to reason that any actor would have difficulty in escaping from the shadow of the shower scene in Psycho, but as the comprehensive filmography will confirm, he made a good many more films besides.
