At 66, Jamie Lee Curtis is enjoying a new wave of award-winning roles. In this interview with 60 Minutes, the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh explains that her career was anything but planned, and talks frankly about plastic surgery, addiction and the freedom she has found later in life.
A career she never saw coming
Curtis says she never thought she would act; she wanted to be a police officer. Home from college, she was persuaded to audition at Universal, which offered her a seven-year contract the next day. She left college and soon landed the lead in Halloween (1978), at 19. Her mother’s role in Psycho may have helped with publicity, she admits, but her auditions got her to the final two. The $300,000 film made more than $70 million.
The real launch came with comedy: her part in Trading Places led John Cleese to write A Fish Called Wanda for her, and that in turn led James Cameron to write her role in True Lies. “That grouping of films gave me my career.”
Regrets, and 26 years sober
In the mid-1980s, while making Perfect, a cinematographer refused to film her one day because her eyes looked tired. She was 25. She had plastic surgery soon after and regretted it immediately. Today she tells women they are perfect as they are. The painkillers she was prescribed led to a dependency she kept private. She has now been sober for 26 years.
The yogurt adverts that made her a target of jokes had a simple reason: they let her stay at home with her children. She has been married to Christopher Guest for more than 40 years, in a family where her parents and stepfather had twelve marriages between them.
Late-career roles and an Oscar
In her sixties, Curtis has found raw, vulnerable parts: an ageing waitress in The Last Showgirl, and Donna Berzatto in The Bear, which won her an Emmy. “I’ve waited my whole life for Donna.” Her role as the tax inspector in Everything Everywhere All at Once brought her the Oscar that neither of her parents won.
She says she has surpassed her parents through sobriety, and through freedom: her mother was restricted by what the industry expected of her, while Curtis showed herself on screen as she really looks. She also runs a production company and has raised over a million dollars for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and donated another million to victims of the Los Angeles wildfires.