Jamie Lee Curtis has been a mainstay of TV and movie screens for close to five decades.
The daughter of not one, but two famed actors, Curtis made her acting debut in her late teens when she guest starred in a number of TV shows before finding fame for her first movie Halloween.
Since then, she has amassed a huge catalogue of acting roles, alongside her work as a producer and children’s book author, and is a well-known philanthropist.
But she is most proud of her longtime marriage to Christopher Guest, with whom she shares two children.
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Jamie Lee Curtis was born in Santa Monica, California, on November 22, 1958, to actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. She has an older sister Kelly, who is also an actress.
Shortly after she was born, her mother starred in the biggest film of her career, Psycho, while Curtis was also a huge star, thanks to roles in some of the biggest films of the time.
Her parents separated when Curtis was three and divorced a year later.
She had a complicated relationship with her father, whom she said left her mother for a 17-year-old starlet he met on a movie set.
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She once said the Some Like It Hot actor was “not interested in being a father” and she barely knew him growing up, but they had formed a relationship by the time he died in 2010.
She had a closer relationship with her mother, who died in 2004.
How did Jamie Lee Curtis get her start and role in Halloween?
Curtis dropped out of college after one semester to pursue an acting career and appeared in TV shows Quincy, ME, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, Colombo, Operation Petticoat and Charlie’s Angels before winning a starring role in the 1978 horror film Halloween.
Curtis was cast as Laurie Strode and reportedly paid just $US8000 (approx. $13,000).
She reflected on the life-changing role while writing for People in 2022.
“I was 19 at the time. I had been fired from… Operation Petticoat, my first real acting gig. I thought my embryonic career was over,” she wrote.
“But I was told about an audition for a low-budget horror film.”
After driving to an office in Hollywood, she was asked to do a scene from the film.
“As the audition began, I remember being nervous. But for me, acting releases fear. I gave mine to Laurie,” she wrote.
Curtis said she later came to understand that part of the reason she got the role was her mother – “the woman most famous for being killed in the shower in the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece Psycho” – and she fully accepted that.
After the success of Halloween, John Carpenter, who directed and co-wrote the film with his then girlfriend, Debra Hill, cast Curtis in another horror film, The Fog.
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Turns in Prom Night, Terror Train and two more Halloween films earned Curtis the title of ‘scream queen’ before she switched to comedy with a role in the 1983 film Trading Places, which won her a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Her sex symbol status continued thanks to roles in the 1985 film Perfect, opposite John Travolta, the 1988 John Cleese/Kevin Kline comedy A Fish Called Wanda, and an underwear-clad dance scene in the 1994 action comedy True Lies opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger.
When she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1998, her husband, mother and daughter Annie were on hand to witness the milestone.
Drug addiction and sobriety
A year later, Curtis sought help for a decade-long addiction to alcohol and prescription painkilling drugs.
She waited two years to make it public.
The 2000s saw her take up comedic roles in the Freaky Friday remake opposite Lindsay Lohan and Christmas with the Kranks before she took on a role in the TV series Scream Queens.
More recently, Curtis appeared as a persnickety internal revenue service inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre in the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once.
It earned her a swathe of award nominations and the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role – achieving something her parents never did, as she pointed out during her acceptance speech.
“My mother and my father were both nominated for Oscars in different categories,” a teary-eyed Curtis said as she looked to the sky.
In recent years, she also starred in the final two instalments in the franchise that made her a star, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends.
While writing for People in 2022, she reflected on how the franchise changed her life thanks to a series of “connecting the dots” moments.
“If I hadn’t been in Halloween, I wouldn’t have met John Landis, the director who put me in Trading Places and showed the world I can be funny,” she wrote
“That got me A Fish Called Wanda. That led to True Lies, which led to Freaky Friday.”
She said the character of Laurie Strode also taught her about resilience, loyalty, perseverance and courage.
‘I’m gonna marry that guy’
She also credited Halloween for meeting her husband of 40 years, Christopher Guest.
“I was with the writer of the original Halloween when I saw my husband of 37 years for the first time,” she wrote in People.
“Debra Hill and I were on my couch in West Hollywood in 1984.
“I opened up an issue of Rolling Stone, saw Christopher Guest in a [This is] Spinal Tap story and said, ‘I’m gonna marry that guy.'”
They were married six months later.
Adoption of children
After struggling to conceive, the couple adopted daughter Annie after her birth in December 1986. They adopted their second child nine years later.
In 2021, Curtis revealed in an interview with AARP: The Magazine that their youngest child was transgender.
“We have watched in wonder and pride as our son became our daughter Ruby,” she said.
“And she and her fiancé will get married next year at a wedding that I will officiate.”
Children’s books and patent
In 1993, Curtis published her first children’s book, When I Was Little: A Four-Year Old’s Memoir of Her Youth.
It was followed by 12 more children’s books and a 2022 graphic novel she co-wrote called Mother Nature.
In 1987, she filed a US patent application for a nappy with a moisture-proof pocket for wipes that can be used with one hand.
Body positivity
For decades, Curtis was known for her body and looks but in recent years she became vocal about the unrealistic expectations on women and admitted she had been “sucking in my stomach since I was 11.”
She also became a proponent of ageing naturally, giving up dying her hair and embracing her natural grey.
Curtis, 66, will next grace the big screen in the film The Last Showgirl alongside Pamela Anderson and Brenda Song.
The longtime LA resident recently announced her family’s donation of $US1 million ($1.6 million) to help the city recover from the bushfires.
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