Jamie Lee Curtis: A Life in Full Bloom

That comment planted a seed. A month later, Curtis picked up a copy of Esquire, came across an article by Tom Chiarella about his addiction to Vicodin, and realized just who Jamie was. “He wrote about how he didn't know where his marriage certificate or his daughter's birth certificate were,” she recalls, “but that he knew where every Vicodin was in his house. There were two in the tip of his left cowboy boot, one under the bill of his Cubs cap … and I recognized all the secrecy and the obsession and that was me."

In February of 1999, Curtis entered recovery, and she's been free of drugs and alcohol ever since. Had she not shed her addiction, she says, she would be “dead for sure.” Sobriety has brought her a community that she desperately wanted and a new identity that she describes as “just a sober person — flawed, contradictory, broken and redeemed."

She has continued the practice of letting go. “I am somebody who sheds every day,” she says. “Let's get rid of that, I don't need that. It's all about old ideas that don't work anymore.” In the mid-1990s, Curtis began to scale down her acting career to devote more time to raising her two children with Guest. For a time, she took up photography as a steady hobby, amassing cameras like a pro. Now, she says, she has given them all away and shoots just fine with her iPhone.

More recently, she has gotten rid of what she calls “vampire” friendships and begun setting boundaries with the friends she has decided to keep or reconnect with. And she has become increasingly comfortable with giving her money away.

She and Guest long ago established their Syzygy Foundation, which supports children's health and environmental causes, and while at home during the pandemic, Curtis launched myhandinyours.com, an online shop offering various objects of comfort made by artists — sculptures, candles, wind chimes — to benefit Children's Hospital Los Angeles. She has underwritten the entire project, and in less than a year it has raised $250,000 for the hospital.

Possibly one of the biggest “old ideas” that Curtis has shed recently is the notion that gender is fixed. With her younger child's permission, Curtis reveals that she and Guest “have watched in wonder and pride as our son became our daughter Ruby. And she and her fiancé will get married next year at a wedding that I will officiate.” Ruby, now 25, is a computer gaming editor. Older sister Annie, 34, is married and a dance instructor. Curtis says she has no grandchildren — “Not yet, but I do hope to."

Her life, these days, is what Curtis describes as a “constant metamorphosis."

Discovery

Brian Bowen Smith

[T]he free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

The actress takes me on a tour of the house next door, which she and Guest purchased in 2016. During the past year, she has reconfigured the bungalow into a writing-in-the-round workshop space, a podcast studio and a warehouse for her myhandinyours.com store. Whizzing across the yard, Curtis passes the garage and observes aloud, “That's my husband's car there.” She stops in the garden to show me the pale lavender Lagerfeld roses she has recently taught herself to cultivate.

“I live by the idea that what I know is that I don't know very much,” she says. “I struggled in school with what I'm assuming was some kind of learning challenge, and I barely got out of high school, since I became an actress so early.” (Curtis’ film debut was a starring role in the 1978 horror movie Halloween.)

She's now making up for lost time, inspired by Steinbeck's statement that wide-ranging individual inquiry is of the utmost importance. In addition to routinely participating in online adult education programs such as entrepreneur Julie Robinson's literaryaffairs.net, Curtis consciously pushes herself to try new things. Podcasting falls into that category.

In November of 2019, Curtis’ good friend, the author Lisa Birnbach, discovered a letter that her daughter, Curtis’ goddaughter Boco Haft, had written to Curtis from summer camp years earlier but never mailed. When Curtis finally read the letter, she got the idea for a television series and commissioned Haft, now a comedy writer, to turn it into an eight-episode script.

At about the same time, Curtis launched her own production company, Comet Pictures, which now has a feature film in the works, as well as a TV series based on Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta novels. Given the slowdown in in-person production due to the pandemic, Curtis decided to develop Haft's script as a podcast instead of a TV show. Cast members include Curtis’ good friend, the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, and Sunny Sandler, the 11-year-old daughter of actor/comedian Adam Sandler.

Recording the audio podcast in the bungalow before she had set up her soundproof studio was a challenge, Curtis says: “We recorded under desks, Jake was in a closet, I mean, it was funky. I took outdoor cushions and made a little cave.” Letters From Camp is set in 2005, intentionally before the proliferation of social media, which Curtis abhors.

"I think social media is poison for young people,” she says. “They don't know yet how to discern what's real and what's fake, what is kind and what is mean. We get lost in this desire for followers. Followers? The word is grotesque!” The show launched last August and quickly become the number one podcast on Audible. Curtis just finished recording Season 2, which guest stars Daniel Radcliffe; a third season is in the planning stages.

Also during the pandemic, Curtis recorded Good Friend, a podcast composed of conversations between her and other prominent individuals about friendship. It is scheduled to be available on iHeartRadio. “And that's just the beginning of that creative work,” Curtis says, beaming. “Things are up and running and really fun."

Pivot

Brian Bowen Smith

The dishes on Curtis’ kitchen shelves are color coordinated and arranged by size. The walls of the guest bathroom in her home are hung with cartoons from The New Yorker, equally spaced, all the way around. Curtis once jokingly described her professional self as a closet organizer, and she is nothing if not prepared. “I'm your American Red Cross participant, earthquake-prepared, well-stocked person,” she admits.

But she has discovered that the most transformative events in her life were ones she never saw coming. And, as Marisha Pessl notes, Curtis’ reactions to those surprise events made all the difference. Back in 1984, Curtis was thumbing through a copy of Rolling Stone and saw a photo of Guest with his costars from This Is Spinal Tap. Though she'd never met him, she said out loud, “I'm going to marry that man.” Five months after their first date, she did.

More recently, the actress got a call out of the blue from a director named David Gordon Green. “Hi, Jamie, listen, I have a movie,” Curtis remembers him saying. “OK. Send it to me. I'll tell you right away,” she responded. “I read it, told him, ‘Yeah let's do it,’ and boom!” The movie was the 2018 reprise of Halloween, and it broke the box office, grossing $256 million. “It was one of the franchise's biggest openings ever, and it starred a woman over 50,” she enthuses. “I was, like, ‘Wait, what? I didn't see that coming.’ Boom!” Curtis will star in two more versions of the horror sequel—Halloween Kills, out in October, and Halloween Ends, in 2022.

In February of last year, Curtis had her bags packed and was ready to depart for Canada to film a movie she would direct and star in for Lifetime. Then COVID hit. “I was ready to travel, and then I didn't leave my house for a year,” she says. “That was a big-ass pivot. All of our lives hinged in a really big way on something that none of us saw coming."

But look what Curtis did instead. “That's the question,” she begins. “What are we planning for, what are we saving for?” While making provisions for the future is prudent, she admits, she no longer lets saving for a rainy day keep her from enjoying the sunny ones. “Why aren't we wearing those Prada pants to lunch with a friend rather than saying, ‘Well, I only have those for a fancy occasion.'? I now feel a freedom in living authentically in the moment and being open to whatever shows up."

Accept love

When Curtis was reading No Great Mischief and came across the line about being loved, she gasped. “That killed me,” she says. “Because I don't think I've really felt that much. As a child, I didn't really feel that."

And yet today, she describes herself as “a deep, serious romantic.” Married to Guest since 1984, she says he is her “one and only,” but notes that she's realistic and has no “big delusions of grandeur.” On the occasion of their 35th wedding anniversary, she wrote him a song. Its chorus repeats, “I feel safe when I drive up and see that you are home."

She elaborates. “That's the long marriage. It's the safety of knowing his car is in the garage, that I'm not alone, and that he's here."

All of it makes more sense when Curtis discloses her secret relaxation ritual, which she partakes in regularly at bedtime. In an attempt to slow the rapid-fire activity in her brain, she turns on her iPhone, goes to YouTube and searches for examples of a particular genre of videos: the surprise wedding proposal in the form of a flash mob dancing to the Bruno Mars hit “Marry You.” The tears roll down Curtis’ cheeks as she watches a hopeful boyfriend get down on one knee in front of the mob and his astonished sweetheart to lip-sync his request:

It's a beautiful night. We're looking for something dumb to do. Hey, baby, I think I wanna marry you.

"It just delights me,” Curtis explains. “I've watched lots of them. Hundreds!” She laughs out loud. “That first moment of pledging yourselves to each other, that hope and thrill, is really the start of the marriage. There's just something magical there, between the reality of it and the beautiful unknown of it. That's marriage. And that's life."

Jamie Lee's Greatest Hits

Trading Places, 1983

In this buddy comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, she played a hooker with a heart of gold.

Perfect, 1985

Her moniker “The Body” may have been inspired by this romance, in which she costarred with John Travolta as an aerobics instructor who favored high-cut leotards.

A Fish Called Wanda, 1988

This comedy crime caper, featuring John Cleese and Kevin Kline, cemented Curtis’ boomer fan base.

True Lies, 1994

She won a Golden Globe for her performance in this action comedy, which costarred Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Freaky Friday, 2003

Curtis’ character traded places (and bodies) with a teenage Lindsay Lohan in this fantasy comedy.

Halloween, 2018

Director David Gordon Green convinced Curtis to reprise the role of Strode in what would prove to be a box office smash. Two sequels are in the works.

Knives Out, 2019

Playing the matriarch of an eccentric family, Curtis helmed an unforgettable ensemble in this murder mystery starring Daniel Craig. Netflix recently won a bidding war for a series of sequels.

(Left to right) Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Aykroyd in "Trading Places."

Courtesy Everett Collection

Meg Grant is an entertainment journalist based in Los Angeles. She profiled Viola Davis in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of AARP The Magazine.