When Jamie Lee Curtis won the best-actress Oscar, in 2023, for Everything Everywhere All at Once, there was much talk of her as a show-business legend.
She certainly has the heritage: Mum was Janet Leigh; Dad was Tony Curtis. And she had certainly served her time. It was as long ago as 1978, when she was just 19, that she broke through as the tormented babysitter Laurie Strode in Halloween, John Carpenter’s genre-defining horror film. She has worked like a Trojan ever since.
There’s more to it than longevity and membership of a cinematic dynasty. She has always given the impression of being a good sport. In interviews she mugs and yells like a vaudeville act. From her teens right through to her 60s – Curtis is now 66 – she has always been the most engaged person on screen. There is a sense that Hollywood, a town now at home to caution, needs someone this unrestrained.
In True Lies, James Cameron’s huge action comedy from the mid-1990s, she played a suburban wife who is swept into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s secret world of international espionage. In A Fish Called Wanda, the beloved late-1980s double-cross caper featuring John Cleese, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin, she played the titular con artist. Before either of those, as Trading Places’ streetwise hooker, she provided a brilliant buffer between Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd.
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But the film people really want to hear about, she says, is Freaky Friday, the stubbornly popular body-swap comedy featuring Curtis as an overworked psychiatrist and Lindsay Lohan as her discontented teenage daughter. Now we have Freakier Friday, its sequel, and Curtis is back to noisily spread the word.
“I didn’t expect it to be so large,” she says of the first movie. “But I think it touches at the very core of human beings, right? Walk a mile in my shoes and then you’ll see what my life is. That’s a universal theme that crosses all cultures and barriers. The film had heart and family and humour and a little bit of magic.”
Based on a popular novel that became a Disney vehicle for Jodie Foster in 1976, Freaky Friday allowed Curtis, whose career had gone a bit quiet, to remind viewers how much they liked her. It’s still a slumber-party staple.
“It felt like I was asked for an immediate reboot wherever I went,” she says. “Of course we had to wait, because the new film required Lindsay to have a 15-year-old child so we could get into another round of it.”
More than two decades after their original life-swapping fiasco, Freakier Friday reunites Curtis and Lohan as Tess and Anna Coleman. For reasons too complicated to explain, Tess ends up swapping bodies with Lily (Sophia Hammons), soon to be Anna’s stepdaughter, while Anna does the same with her own daughter, Harper (Julia Butters).
“I don’t know how to flirt as an old person,” comes one terrible realisation. “What do they talk about? Transitional lenses? Phone repairs?”
It is all good clean fun. But it has things to say.
“Imagine being a 15-year-old and you wake up in the morning looking like this,” Curtis says, gesturing at herself over Zoom. “It’s not a good day. I very specifically tried to encourage the writing staff and our director, Nisha [Ganatra], to make fun of it. Because I have no vanity about ageing. I really don’t. Even just these lips ... I’ve always had thin lips.”
She enjoyed referencing them in the scenes in which young Lily takes over her body.
“That was my contribution, speaking as a teen in my body and asking, ‘Where are her lips? She has no lips. Where have they gone?’”
[ Freakier Friday review: Old-school confection delights in every silly sceneOpens in new window ]
So Freakier Friday is, in its humble way, important to Curtis. Not just because it gets her back before fans but also because it dovetails with her concerns of many years. Long a critic of Hollywood’s unrealistic beauty standards, she recently described the rise of fillers, surgical enhancements and cosmetic filters as “wiping out generations of beauty ... Once you mess with your face you can’t get it back.”
The star speaks from experience. A cinematographer’s unkind remark while she was filming the 1985 gym romance Perfect – “Her eyes are baggy” – prompted her to undergo surgery in her mid-20s, a decision she deeply regrets, not least because it sparked a decade-long opioid dependency. “I tried plastic surgery and it didn’t work. It got me addicted to Vicodin,” she says. “I’m 22 years sober now.”
Curtis had quite an upbringing. Her father was the sleek golden-age star of such classics as Some Like It Hot. Leigh, though busy in hits such as The Manchurian Candidate and Bye Bye Birdie, was destined to be remembered as the murdered traveller Marion Crane in Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic.
So Curtis saw the glamour of Hollywood but also how cruel the acting life can be, as she watched her parents’ careers decline in later years. Some children of stars hunger for the spotlight. Others find safe lives in less intrusive professions.
Curtis made at least one attempt to escape the family business, initially studying law enforcement at college. But she soon drifted towards the studio lot.
Halloween, Carpenter’s hugely tense shocker, was a refinement and an enhancement of a genre that her mother helped invent through her role in Psycho.
Arguably, no one is now as synonymous with the slasher flick’s final-girl trope as Curtis is, having survived Michael Myers’s attempts to kill her in five Halloween films. She has a vulnerability in those movies. But the actor – whose mother declined a request from a producer friend to allow her to audition for The Exorcist when she was 13 – also has a toughness that shows through even when she’s screaming for her life in a cupboard.
Stereotyping could easily have followed. Many are the “scream queens” who, after early success in horror, find it hard to thrive outside its world. Linda Blair, who eventually landed that juvenile lead in The Exorcist, failed to build on early visibility.
Curtis was initially shuffled towards shockers such as Carpenter’s durable The Fog, Paul Lynch’s grisly Prom Night and Roger Spottiswoode’s Terror Train (helpfully described by its own producer as “like Halloween on a train”).
“I do not like horror movies,” she later said. “I do not say this for a joke. Although it gets a laugh, I really don’t.” But that was where the work was.
Trading Places, from 1983, is the film that changed things for Curtis. John Landis, its director, fought with Paramount Pictures to get her into the starry cast. The studio heads couldn’t understand why he would want the girl best known for fleeing masked maniacs in increasingly shabby slashers.
It was no mean feat to prove her comic chops against Aykroyd and Murphy, but her work was sufficiently strong to land her a Bafta.
Comedy opened the door to a wider career. From then on she was as likely to be carrying out perfect pratfalls as defending herself with hatchets. Watch five minutes of her owning the sofa on The Graham Norton Show and her funny bones seem unmistakable. But it took a while for the industry to get it.
Curtis has been married to the comic actor, director and writer Christopher Guest since 1984 – the year he gained his first hold on immortality as Nigel Tufnel in This Is Spinal Tap. As Guest is a baron – his grandfather was a British Labour Party MP who was awarded a peerage – Curtis is technically a baroness. Photographs exist of her attending the House of Lords with the co-composer of Big Bottom and Lick My Love Pump.
Her next notable role looks set to be as Jessica Fletcher in the movie reboot of Murder, She Wrote, the classic American television mystery series that, despite many efforts at resurrection, has been dormant since Angela Lansbury last played Cabot Cove’s amateur sleuth, in 1996.
Some reports have suggested that it will be Curtis’s final role before she retires. The actor, who is the most energetic interviewee imaginable, certainly doesn’t look or sound like someone who’s getting ready to walk away from the movieverse.
“I hate the last day on set of every movie,” she says. “It’s very hard for me to say goodbye. I’ve had to say goodbye for 47 years to my work families, and it breaks me every time. I would love to be, like, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s Madonna!’ – and everyone would look, and then I’d run off. I find it very emotional.”
Showbiz legend. Hollywood royalty. Actual baroness. The late, great Lansbury only got to be a dame.
Freakier Friday is on general release
