Jamie Lee Curtis is a morning person. “It’s my nature,” she says cheerfully when we meet by Zoom in Los Angeles. It’s a respectable 10am but Jamie has already been up for several hours. “I was out late last night at an event honouring women in film, so I got very little sleep,” she admits. “But I was up and awake at about 3.30am or 4.00am this morning. I wake up this way every day – optimistic and energetic.”
She stops and, ever the first to poke fun at herself, laughs ruefully. “By 4pm or 5pm, maybe I’m less optimistic and a little more tired – maybe a little more grouchy. But in the mornings I’m fine.”
She’s certainly looking fine this bright Beverly Hills morning, erect and graceful in an elegant black suit, her in-your-face white hair gleaming in a smart bob, those narrow blue-green eyes crinkling into that familiar cat-got-the-cream grin. Her face is criss-crossed with laugh lines now: she’s not a young woman any more and isn’t trying to look like one. In fact she turned 67 on November 22…
“… and I love it!” she exclaims, happily. “I love ageing! Because ageing brings wisdom and ideas, and the best thing is that it’s not just the fragments of stimuli anymore, but the kind of completion of circles of ideas, which is so exciting, because the privilege of getting old – if you’re lucky enough to survive to get old – is that you get to complete a full life. These days, I am smarter, prettier, funnier, softer, louder, more opinionated, more political, more well-read than I was when I was 30. I wouldn’t want to be 30 again. I wouldn’t want to be 20 again. I wouldn’t want to be a day younger than I am, even though the pantyhose I’m wearing are cutting into my no-longer waistline. ‘Cause I’m a person without a waistline now. I won an Oscar but lost my waistline!’”
If anyone has reason to feel good about her life, it’s Jamie Lee. At an age when female actors have traditionally been put out to pasture, her career is rollicking from success to success, with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once under her admittedly expanding belt, a starring role in the new James Brooks film Ella McCay, to be released in Britain on December 12 – oh, and did she mention that the first honoree in that Women in Film event she attended last night was one Jamie Lee Curtis, accepting the Jane Fonda Humanitarian Award for artistic and philanthropic work, presented to her by Jane Fonda herself? Why wouldn’t she be happy?
Ask her the secret to her longevity in so notoriously unstable a business, however, and Jamie – who is nobody’s fool underneath the jokes – becomes serious.
“I was patient,” she says, firmly. “Whatever happened in my career, I kept suiting up and showing up and doing my thing. I’ve done some terrible work. I’ve done some really awful movies.
“But I’ve always shown up for them. I always talk to young people about putting themselves in the path of opportunity. You know, it’s like dating, right? You’re not going to meet somebody if you’re just sitting in your house. And in the same way, you’re not going to get a job just sitting waiting for somebody to give you a job.
“You have to put yourself in the path for it. So I’ve put myself in the path of these opportunities by continuing to do work even if it’s been sh*tty work. And once in a while something happens and you get lucky. And I’ve been very lucky.”
In many ways, she is part of Hollywood history. The daughter of screen legends Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, she was one of the last of the famous Hollywood starlets contracted to Universal Studios. In her twenties she became the ultimate horror film scream queen playing Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise before she moved to the mainstream in her thirties with movies like Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda.
Then followed a period of professional highs and lows – in 2006, she announced her retirement from acting – before she returned to leading roles aged 60, playing a grown-up Laurie Strode in the new Halloween series.
Since then she’s barely been off our screens with hits such as Knives Out and Everything Everywhere All At Once, and a plum role on TV as a hard-drinking family matriarch in the acclaimed comedy series The Bear. After a lifetime of grafting, she’s hit the jackpot – and she knows it.
“It all came out of nowhere,” she admits. “I was a replacement part in Knives Out! Knives Out was a wonderful movie – but it was originally this little movie that suddenly became this big movie and I was in it! And then, with Everything Everywhere All At Once, no one could have had any expectation that that little movie about family relationships and the multiverse could or would have touched such a spark of energy and excitement as that one did. But you know, once in a while something happens. And it’s happened.”
Which brings us to Emma McCay, the forthcoming political comedy-drama directed by the legendary director, writer and producer James L. Brooks whose films include Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets.
It features British-French rising star Emma Mackey as an idealistic young local politician juggling work and personal life, with Woody Harrelson as her ne’erdowell father and Jamie as her no-nonsense bar-owner aunt, Helen.
The part, says Jamie now, came out of the blue. “I get a letter from Jim [James L. Brooks] saying, ‘Hi Jamie Lee, I’ve worked on this script for 15 years. I would love you to play Helen. We shoot in the fall. I direct way better than I handwrite. Jim.’”
It was the fulfilment of a longtime ambition for Jamie, who had dreamed of working with Brooks ever since the 1983 family weepie Terms of Endearment, the tale of the loving but complicated relationship between a strong-minded woman, Shirley MacLaine, and her daughter, Debra Winger. ‘
“When I was a young actress …” begins Jamie, and then stops. “You know how there are actresses who always want the same parts, like – I’m guessing here, but I’m sure Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence, who are both actresses of the same age, have wanted the same part, but one got it and the other didn’t. Well, for me, when I was coming up, Debra Winger was the actress who got every part that I ever wanted.
“Now I was not even on the radar then for Terms of Endearment. But Debra Winger was on my radar because she’s a brilliant actress. And when Terms of Endearment came out, that was an example of me thinking, ‘That’s the greatest performance I’ve ever seen by a young actress and, wow, what would it feel like to be able to do that?’”
She feels she has at last got that opportunity with Ella McCay’s Aunt Helen.
“She’s a worker,” she says, smiling affectionately, of the character. “She runs a bar. She runs a restaurant. She’s been bussing tables for a very long time, and there’s a physicality to that job – it isn’t an intellectual job, it’s sweat equity. She’s carried a lot of trays.
“The event I went to last night, with all the fancy people in the room, all the beautifully decked out crowd of people … the people there that my heart was attached to were the people working as caterers. They were carrying trays with 40 people’s dinners on them through a crowd of people yapping at each other over them, while they were trying to do their job. I’m always trying to make way for people – I’m like ‘Hey, everybody, move back, move back’. I really felt for them.”
You have the impression that Jamie Lee is not someone to pussyfoot around stating her opinions. “Hmm.” She thinks about that for a moment. “I would love to tell you that I am a brazen truthteller who tells other people like it is. But I am also trying to learn in my old age that what I think about somebody else is none of my effing business.
“I once heard somebody say that if you offer a solution to somebody it’s a form of aggression, because what you’re really saying is ‘I have a better idea than yours’. There’s a saying that ‘whatever happens in my hula hoop is my business, and what happens outside my hula hoop is none of my business’. I think that’s true – so much so that one year a friend of mine gave me a hula hoop for my birthday!”
Happily married since 1984 to writer and comedian Christopher Guest, she has two grown-up children, Annie and Ruby, and says that one of her firm beliefs as a mother is to let them live their lives on their own terms. “As a parent you try to run interference, and help them if you can. But my real job as a mother is to make sure they survive the fragmented parts of all our lives so that they can emerge at the end with their own minds, their own ideas, their own passions.”
She doesn’t believe in worrying too much about what can go wrong. “I once heard a saying that there are two kinds of people. One that wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Good morning, God’. And the other who wakes up and says, ‘Good God, morning!’ I choose to wake up and say, “Good morning, God.”
She follows this up with a chuckle. “I love being me. Even with the tight pantyhose!”
