Jamie Lee Curtis knows she’ll leave Hollywood, having already started ‘self-retiring’.
The Hollywood star, 66, is the daughter of two screen icons in Psycho star Janet Leigh and Some Like it Hot’s Tony Curtis.
She shared her frank assessment over how the movie industry has impacted her after seeing both her parents struggle with their careers as their youthful looks began to fade.
‘I witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age. I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone,’ she told The Guardian.
‘And that’s very painful.’
The consequences of that have had a lasting effect on the True Lies and A Fish Called Wanda star who said that, as a result: ‘I have been self-retiring for 30 years.
‘I have been prepping to get out, so that I don’t have to suffer the same as my family did.I want to leave the party before I’m no longer invited.’
Curtis, who shot to fame aged 19 thanks to her role in slasher flick Halloween (1978), is actually currently riding high on the wave of career revival, having won her first Oscar in 2023 for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
She also received a Bafta nomination for supporting actress earlier this year thanks to her turn with Pamela Anderson as cocktail waitress Annette in The Last Showgirl, while she recently nabbed an Emmy for her guest spot on TV show The Bear, playing alcoholic Donna Berzatto.
The actress is under no illusion that her stock has soared as she describes the experience of playing Donna as ‘an unleashing of 50 years of being a performer who was never considered to have any range’.
‘It took no toll. The toll has been 40 years of holding back something I know is here,’ she added.
Curtis will be back in cinemas in August as Tess Coleman, mother to Lindsay Lohan’s Anna, who endured a body swap with her daughter in the classic Y2K movie from 2003.
In the sequel, Anna has her own teenage daughter, Harper (Julia Butters), and the swap goes four ways as it also involves Harper’s enemy Lily (Sophia Hammons) – who is the one this time inhabiting the now grandma Tess’s body.
She also confirms it was she that pushed through the idea of making Freakier Friday with Disney CEO Bob Iger directly after being constantly asked about it by fans while she was promoting the hugely popular 2018 reboot of Halloween.
The star jokingly calls herself ‘a weapon of mass promotion’ but it was also her that convinced Disney top brass to ensure Freakier Friday wasn’t released only on streaming but got it’s proper run in cinemas too.
Her argument? As Curtis tells it, ‘if you don’t think the audience that saw Barbie is going to be the audience that goes and sees Freakier Friday, you’re wrong’.
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