Profile Of Jamie Lee Curtis

TV & Film

Oct 9

Jamie Lee Curtis collage — Image Source: CultureSlate

She was Hollywood’s first “scream queen”, although one could argue that this title actually belongs to her mother. She was the so-called “final girl”, the only one left to face evil, after all her naughty friends had been killed.

Although the name Jamie Lee Curtis will forever be associated with the Halloween franchise, the career of the now 66-year-old actress includes much more than fighting an undying nemesis with a mask.

Hollywood Royalty

Born on November 2, 1958, as the second child of Janet Leigh (probably best known for her role as Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) and Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot), Curtis experienced all the pros and cons of growing up in a famous Hollywood family in her early years. Her parents divorced when she was four, and after that, her father didn’t care much about his daughters, even cutting Jamie Lee, her sister, and her four half-siblings out of his will when Tony Curtis died in 2010.

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Jamie Lee Curtis' parents — Image Source: Today

Jamie Lee stayed with her mother, graduated from high school in 1976, and studied law at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, but dropped out after just one semester to pursue an acting career.

Meeting Michael Meyers

Curtis had her first role in an episode of Quincy M.E. in 1977, and in the same year, she appeared as a waitress in the episode “The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case” of Columbo. She was a regular in the first season of the ABC sitcom Operation Petticoat, where she played Lt. Barbara Duran.

When director John Carpenter and his producer Debra Hill looked for actresses for their low-budget horror movie Halloween, they wanted three types of girls: a vivacious one, a cheerleader type, and a more grounded and earnest character. When she auditioned for the movie, Curtis was sure that if she got a role, it would be that of the lively girl, but Carpenter cast her as Laurie Strode, a rather shy babysitter.

Carpenter called her after the first day of shooting, and Curtis was sure that the director would fire her, as she was very unhappy with her performance, but he only wanted to compliment her. As production continued, Curtis started to like the “laissez-faire” approach that naturally arose from a shoestring budget and a tight schedule.

Halloween earned more than $70 million at the box office, and it seemed as if the film's heroine now had the liberty to choose the roles she liked.

Scream Queen

But strangely, she got offered no other roles in feature films and had to get back to playing small parts in TV shows, like in one episode of the soap opera The Love Boat (1978), where she played alongside her mother (not for the last time), Charlie’s Angels, or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

It was John Carpenter again, who cast her as Elizabeth Solley in his 1980s film The Fog. This time, Curtis didn’t have to fight a masked killer, but a group of undead sailors who returned after a century to take their revenge.

Most of her next films were cheap horror/slasher B-movies, like Prom Night and Halloween II, this time under the direction of Rick Rosenthal, where she fought (and seemingly killed) Michael Myers again. In an episode of SNL from 1980, she even made fun of her new image as the scream queen of Hollywood, showing her funny side, which would influence her career going forward.

From Slasher To Sexy

Although she feared risking a career that had just started to take off, she refused to take any more roles in horror movies. Her first chance to show a more feminine and sensual side was in the 1981 made-for-TV film Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story, where she played the titular character, a blond Playboy model who is killed by her husband.

Also in her next role, she played a young woman who had to rely on her good looks and her body to get along. Wearing very short and tight dresses and a ridiculous wig, she appeared alongside Dan Acroyd and Eddy Murphy in John Landis’ Trading Places as the good-hearted prostitute Ophelia, a role that earned her a BAFTA award in 1984.

n 1985, she starred alongside John Travolta in the romantic comedy Perfect, where she played a former professional swimmer who became a fitness trainer. The movie itself is forgettable and was nominated for three Golden Raspery Awards, but who could forget the famous dance scene, which Curtis and Jimmy Fellon recreated 40 years later.

Curtis’s role as Ophelia put her on the radar of John Cleese, the famous member of Monty Python. Especially for her, the British comedian wrote the screenplay for A Fish Called Wanda, where Curtis acted alongside Cleese, Kevin Kline, and Michal Palin, another member of the Pythons. To this day, her role as the seductive, manipulative, ruthless, but also funny and lovable Wanda is regarded as one of the best performances of Curtis’ career.

No Typical Hollywood Marriage

In 1984, Jamie Lee Curtis met Christopher Guest, a British-American actor and former member of the House of Lords. He rose to fame after starring in the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, directed by Rob Reiner, where Guest played one member of a fictional heavy metal band. After spotting a picture of Guest in an issue of Rolling Stone, Debra Hill sent Curtis’ phone number to Guest’s agent, foretelling that the two would marry one day. Though Guest never called Curtis, the two met several weeks later. Their wedding was in late 1984.

Christopher Guest and Jamie Lee Curtis — Image Source: WWBL

To this day, it’s a marriage without scandals, affairs, or major gossip. They have two adopted daughters, Annie and Ruby.

Back To Television (Temporarily)

Jamie Lee Curtis’ next big role after A Fish Called Wanda was a drastic departure from the sexy and funny Wanda Gershwitz. In Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, she starred as a young police officer who had to deal with the fact that wearing a uniform didn’t protect her from the harsh truth of a world that is dominated by men.

Blue Steel was mostly shot at night, depriving Curtis of her role as a young mother. After production had finished, she chose to put her career on the back burner and focus on her family.

From 1989 to 1992, she was the female lead of the ABC sitcom Anything but Love, alongside Richard Lewis. Years before the advent of streaming services and massive TV productions, stepping away from feature films and working for television usually meant a downgrade for any actor or actress, and there were rumors that Curtis would retire from acting all along.

She countered those rumors by shooting six films between 1991 and 1994, including My Girl and Forever Young, alongside Mel Gibson.

In 1994, she worked with James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies, a blockbuster that offered her the chance to show both her comedic potential and her willingness to do massive action scenes. Her role as the initially unknowing wife of a secret agent who later becomes one herself earned her a Golden Globe Award in 1995.

Freaky Jamie

After the turn of the century, Curtis took on several projects that allowed her to break the boundaries of what Hollywood actresses were typically “allowed” after the age of 40. Starting with Freaky Friday, where she swept bodies with her daughter (played by Lindsey Lohan), she specifically sought out roles where she could play weird, ridiculous, and often vastly overreacting characters, never afraid to ridicule herself.

This attitude of “not giving a f...” hasn’t changed that much since then, no matter if she struggled to acquire a big box of ham in Christmas with the Kranks, playing the strange (and platinum blond) family’s matriarch in Knives Out, or purposely crashing a car into the family’s dinner in The Bear.

In 2023, she finally won her first Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Other Venues

At the age of 38, she wrote her first children’s book, When I Was Little: A Four-Year-Old's Memoir of Her Youth. 12 more followed between 1996 and 2018.

In 2023, Curtis and her co-author Russell Goldman published a graphic novel called Mother Nature, based on an eco-horror film to be written and directed by Curtis.

She was a blogger for The Huffington Post and launched two podcast series, Letters from Camp and Good Friend with Jamie Lee Curtis.

Inner Demons

It’s hard to imagine that a beautiful young actress who’s seemingly made it in the cruel world of Hollywood would have to constantly fight her inner demons and lack self-esteem. In most of her photos from the early 1980s, she didn’t smile, and even if she did, they were smiles without showing her teeth, as she thought that they were not white enough. Curtils believed that her face was unsymmetrical and didn’t regard herself as handsome, always believing that she would be cast as the unattractive girl. When a photographer refused to take a picture of her because she had “baggy eyes”, she reacted with a cosmetic operation, causing massive pain, which she tried to cure with a steadily growing dose of novocaine and alcohol. After an addiction that lasted for nearly a decade, she finally went to rehab. She sees her recovery as the greatest achievement of her life.

As she had done on the first day of shooting Halloween, Curtils was filled with self-doubt, believing she was never good enough and constantly comparing herself to other actresses for major parts of her career.

Being Laurie Strode

Like many actors and actresses in the later part of their careers, Jamie Lee Curtis came to terms with the fact that she will always be associated with the role that made her famous: Laurie Strode in Halloween. She reprised her role 20 years after the first movie in Halloween H20 (where her mother had a little cameo), now as an adult with a nearly grown-up son. In 2002, she played the character again in Halloween: Resurrection and more recently in a new trilogy of films (Halloween, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends), where she battled Michael Myers not only for her own sake, but now, as an old woman, for that of her daughter and her grandkid.