Mr. Perkins, in his final days, spoke to his sons about issuing a note upon his death, and the boys wrote down their father's words. "I chose not to go public about this, because to misquote 'Casablanca,' I'm not much at being noble, but it doesn't take too much to see that the problems of an old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy old world."

Mr. Perkins said he learned "more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life."

Ms. Berenson, who married Mr. Perkins in 1973, said she was surprised at the ferocity of his comments about show business. Although his illness engulfed him, Ms. Berenson said that her husband was angry because he had spent long stretches of time without working, even before he became ill, and his career was almost totally overwhelmed by his portrayal of the lunatic Norman Bates in "Psycho."

"At one point he went two years without working, but he was such a stoic he never talked about it," she recalled. "He never complained. He learned to play the piano. He made phone calls. He would sit by the phone and wait for the agents to call. He had such mixed feeling about Norman Bates. On the one hand he began thinking that others in the industry saw him as that character, strange and weird. And on the other hand it was a burden. It was very limiting to his career."

One of his last roles was in an NBC television drama, "In the Deep Woods," in which he plays a police detective. The movie is scheduled to be broadcast next month.