Let’s not sugarcoat this: Jamie Lee Curtis hasn’t been working much these past few years. Since starring alongside California politico Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1994’s “True Lies,” her best acting job–aside from cell-phone commercials–has been in “Halloween: H20,” in which she lamely revived the character she made famous in John Carpenter’s original 1978 slasher flick. Just last August, during an appearance on the “Today” show to plug the latest of her five best-selling children’s books, Curtis talked about her film career in the past tense. It was over, she told Matt Lauer.
Before Curtis goes to bed this week, she might want to put her phone on vibrate. “Freaky Friday,” which grossed $6 million in its first 24 hours last Wednesday en route to a solid opening weekend, is the surprise hit of the summer–and Curtis is getting the best reviews of her career. As Tess Coleman, the tightwad mother who trades places with her 16-year-old, punk-rocking daughter (Lindsay Lohan), Curtis pouts, slumps her shoulders and blurts out such lines as “So we’re stuck in this suck-fest?” with gleeful conviction. It’s no surprise to hear her admit that she found her scenes as an adult more challenging. (Having a 16-year-old daughter of her own didn’t hurt.) Curtis hasn’t been this hot since she took off her top in “Trading Places.” Freaky? Just a little. Asked how it all feels, she pauses. “It feels… I am… " Speechless? Her?
During a two-hour interview with NEWSWEEK, which begins at a rooftop photo shoot, continues in the car back to her hotel and still continues in her 16th-floor suite (where her 7-year-old son, Tommy, watches the Cartoon Network and swipes french fries from the table while Mom talks), Curtis pauses for breath maybe four times. Within seconds of introducing herself–“Are you the writer? I’m Jamie the subject”–she’s off to the races, telling stories about her first winter in New York with her husband, director Christopher Guest; her first car (a Mercury Capri); the shape of her face (“like a doorstop”); the tricky demands of lighting a 44-year-old woman, and why she doesn’t like hats. Then, while the photographer reloads, she flops down on the rooftop’s concrete, peels off her black-and-white Prada sandals and laces up a pair of giant yellow clown shoes–which the photographer had brought along at her request. Once they’re on, she yelps with joy: “Look at these things and tell me they’re not the call of the day!”
Despite her periodic successes, Curtis –has never quite escaped the stigma of being the answer to one of Hollywood’s great trivia questions. (Which actress is the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh?) Of course, her parents divorced when she was 3, and then Leigh remarried a stockbroker and relocated the family to rural Benedict Canyon, Calif.–so assumptions about a celebrity-soaked upbringing, she regrets to report, are mostly off the mark. That said, her father is Tony Curtis and he was larger than life. “My friend Richard Lewis used to do a bit about my family,” she says. “He’d pretend to be my father–he’d do the whole voice–and he’d go, ‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t play blocks with you right now! I’m fencing Kirk Douglas!’ "
It wasn’t until Curtis decided to pursue acting that her pedigree became a burden. “The constant fear that I was drifting in the very, very big wake of my parents,” she says, used to chew up her self-confidence. Not anymore. Curtis can be downright immodest about her gifts–“Acting isn’t hard for me at all. It’s effortless”–and hilariously candid about all the lumps she’s taken. Like in the 1980s, when she watched from the B-list as other pretty actresses blew past her. Or in the 1990s, as the roles dried up and she battled dependency on alcohol and painkillers. Or even now, as a onetime sex symbol forced into peace negotiations with gravity. “Horror movies were considered this illegitimate third cousin of show business,” she says. “Plus, my parents were famous, so obviously I couldn’t actually be talented myself. All of that just gave me a thick skin–and a lot of pride that, despite it all, I still made a living. But I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me watching women my age get opportunities I never had. I remember when ‘Witness’ came out–that was Kelly McGillis’s first role, and she was in a Peter Weir movie with Harrison Ford. That just didn’t happen to me. For me, it’s almost always been, ‘Who? When? Where? How much? Great, let’s do it.’ I turn down work very rarely–obviously. Look at ‘Virus.’ And I’ve made some really horrible films, and I’ve been stiff and pretty lousy in some films. But here I am, still an actor.”
Getting sober, Curtis says, has made her more fearless and less vain onscreen–invaluable for a movie like “Freaky Fri-day,” where she has to look in a mirror and shriek, “Oh, no, I’m old! I look like the crypt keeper!” She was game. “Your average actress over 40 takes at least two hours in the hair-and-makeup trailer,” says the film’s director, Mark Waters. “Jamie took half an hour. She’d be pushing people away, going, ‘I look fine!’ " Last year Curtis raised eyebrows when she posed in the women’s magazine More without makeup, styling or any photo retouching. “The idea was to say, ‘See, I look like you, now let’s get on with our lives and be happy women’.” Curtis still has a blast during photo shoots, but now she does it her way–hence the clown shoes. “Look at me,” she says back at the hotel. “I’m wearing my own clothes. I don’t have big, buff, Angela Bassett arms. I don’t drink that weird tea all those women drink. And I don’t do five hours of yoga a day. This is me, in a nutshell.” Delighted to hear it. Now don’t be a stranger.
