In Hollywood, it's not unusual for actors to try and fit the industry standard of beauty and marketability, plotting every outfit and career move with the prowess of a chessmaster. But Jamie Lee Curtis is not one of them. Candid and spontaneous, she fearlessly calls it as she sees it, even when it comes to herself. We met Jamie Lee Curtis in Los Angeles, where at 66 years old, she is savoring a new wave of award-winning performances. We asked her about her decades-long career. She told us it was anything but planned.
Jamie Lee Curtis: My life hinged on a couple seconds I never saw coming. I never thought I'd be an actor in my life. My teeth were the color of concrete. They were gray. I was cute but not pretty. And so, I never saw that coming.
She probably should have. Jamie Lee Curtis was born into Hollywood royalty, the daughter of screen-idols Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, two of the biggest stars during the golden age of cinema. But Jamie Lee says she wanted to be a cop. She was home from college, when a friend convinced her to audition for Universal Studios.
Jamie Lee Curtis: I did the scene. And she said, "That was very good," whatever. And I was like, "Oh, OK. Great. Thanks." I said, "Listen, if this is gonna work out I need to know, because I'm going back to college in, like, two days."
Sharyn Alfonsi: Very practical.
Jamie Lee Curtis
60 Minutes
Jamie Lee Curtis: So like, she laughed or whatever. And they called me the next day and they gave me a seven-year contract at Universal, and I quit college.
Almost immediately, she booked the 1978 horror film "Halloween."
Curtis was cast as the bookish babysitter, Laurie Strode, terrorized by an unrelenting killer. It was her first movie. She was 19 years old playing the lead.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Were people saying, "Oh, she got the job because of who her parents are, because of the pedigree?"
Jamie Lee Curtis: I know. I guarantee you the fact that my mother was in 'Psycho' was a determining factor that maybe that will get them a little extra publicity. Now, did it get me to that final two? No, my auditions got me to the final two.
Jamie Lee Curtis: This was a $300,000 horror movie. This was not a job that a lot of people wanted.
"Halloween" ended up grossing more than $70 million and became a cult classic. But it didn't exactly launch Jamie Lee Curtis' career.
Jamie Lee Curtis: My big break after "Halloween" was, I was on "Love Boat" with Janet Leigh. Beautiful Janet Leigh playing my mother. And then I was in a "Charlie's Angels" episode where I am Cheryl Ladd's best friend, pro golfer. So those are the two jobs I get post "Halloween."
Sharyn Alfonsi: Were you thinking at this point, like, "People aren't hiring me, they just want my mom around, or the name?"
Jamie Lee Curtis: You know what? Sure.
Sharyn Alfonsi: But didn't that bother you?
Jamie Lee Curtis: No. Because-- because I was doin' my thing.
Curtis' "thing" was transforming into a "scream queen" for a new generation with a string of horror movies.
Sharyn Alfonsi: I read that you didn't even like scary movies.
Jamie Lee Curtis: I don't like scary movies.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Still?
Jamie Lee Curtis: Still. Oh, please. Awful.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Why?
Jamie Lee Curtis: Awful. The smart aleck answer is because life is scary.
Jamie Lee Curtis
60 Minutes
It's a surprising thing to hear from an actress who's known for being fearless. Before that spin around the bedpost, opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in "True Lies." Curtis held her own next to Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, in her first comedy feature, "Trading Places," directed by John Landis. She says her role as Ophelia, a wise, kind-hearted, street-walker is what really launched her career.
Sharyn Alfonsi: That part, I mean, she's gritty, and the gum, and the whole thing. How much of that did you bring to her?
Jamie Lee Curtis: John stuck gum in my mouth every day. Literally I would stand there and he'd walk up, I'd go, "OK." I mean, it's-- you know, it's just a great part. But here's the other thing, and-- this is crucial, and this will make the piece. If I'm not in "Trading Places," John Cleese does not write "A Fish Called Wanda" for me. If I'm not in "A Fish Called Wanda," Jim Cameron does not write the part in "True Lies" for me. And that grouping of films gave me my career, for sure.
If it all sounds like fairytale, it wasn't. By the mid-80s, Jamie Lee Curtis was a well-established actor when she made a movie with John Travolta called "Perfect." By all accounts, and from every angle, she was.
Jamie Lee Curtis: I took it very seriously as an actor and of course, I look really good in a leotard. And believe me, I've seen enough pictures of me in that leotard where even I go, like, "Really? Come on."
But she says a cinematographer working on the film criticized the way she looked.
Jamie Lee Curtis: He was like, "Yeah, I'm not shooting her today. Her eyes are baggy." And I was 25? So, for him to say that was very embarrassing. So as soon as the movie finished, I ended up having some plastic surgery.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And how did that go?
Jamie Lee Curtis: Not well. That's just not what you wanna do when you're 25 or 26. And I regretted it immediately and have kind of sort of regretted it since.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Even now?
Jamie Lee Curtis: Way so now because I've become a really public advocate to say to women, "You're gorgeous and you're perfect the way you are." So oh, yeah I, I, I, it was not a good thing for me to do.
Sharyn Alfonsi: That's when you started taking...You've been public about this-- you started taking pain-- pain killers.
Jamie Lee Curtis
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Jamie Lee Curtis: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean--Well they give them to you. I became very enamored with the warm bath of an opiate. You know, drank a little bit…never to excess, never any big public demonstrations, I was very quiet, very private about it but it became a dependency for sure.
Curtis says she's been sober for 26 years.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Did you worry when you shared your story of how you got sober that it would impact your career?
Jamie Lee Curtis: I think I worried more that selling yogurt that makes you sh** was gonna impact my career than for me to acknowledge that I had an addiction. Um I make the joke. It's a funny joke but it's true.
Ahh that yogurt commercial…famously parodied by "Saturday Night Live."
Curtis, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, suddenly began selling pantyhose and hawking rental cars.
Sharyn Alfonsi: 'True Lies' had made $400 million. You coulda done anything you wanted to do but you were taking those spokesperson jobs. Why?
Jamie Lee Curtis: For the most part because they allowed me to stay home with my kids. So, I am-- I am an imperfect, you know, working mom because no working moms are perfect.
Sharyn Alfonsi: It's all scotch-taped together.
Jamie Lee Curtis: I'm looking at one. You're speaking to one. We make it look good. We think we've done it. But the truth is, we feel badly. But I know how much time away from them I spent in pursuit of my own creativity.
Curtis has two children with Christopher Guest, the actor and director best known for "This is Spinal Tap" and taking aim at dog shows and even filmmaking in a series of mockumentaries. They've been married for more than 40 years.
Jamie Lee Curtis: My mother was married four times. My father was married five times. That's nine. My stepfather was married three, so I come from an immediate family of 12 marriages. So my joke, "I'm still married to my first husband," um you know, it was important to me that I stay married to my husband, that he's my husband.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Did you ever pass up a role that you wish you had taken?
Jamie Lee Curtis: No.
Once their kids were grown, Curtis traded in carpool duty for unapologetically driving her own career.
Jamie Lee Curtis: We're going this way.…
She runs her own production company, which has a TV-series in the works, starring Nicole Kidman, and a feature film about the catastrophic Paradise wildfires in 2018. She's also running her own charity. Curtis has raised over a million dollars for Children's Hospital Los Angeles and donated another million to victims of the recent wildfires, which destroyed much of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, including this home where she filmed the millennial hit "Freaky Friday and the upcoming sequel, "Freakier Friday." And four decades after the first "Halloween," she finally put that franchise to rest. But it is a string of raw, vulnerable characters that came to Curtis in her 60's that led to a comeback, even she never imagined: playing the aging waitress in "The Last Showgirl," or sucking the oxygen out of the kitchen as the combustible matriarch Donna Berzatto in Hulu's TV-series "The Bear."
Sharyn Alfonsi: Donna, the images in my mind of her, buttering the bread, with the nails, and the eyelash on the cheek.
Jamie Lee Curtis: The eyelash. That single eyelash I think won me an Emmy. I swear to God.
Jamie Lee Curtis: I've waited my whole life for Donna, patiently, quietly cooking. 13:07:39;24 My own creative mental life, my own-- you know, my own alcoholism. It's just so beautifully written that you don't have to do anything.
But it was 2022's mystical, somewhat, mind-bending "Everything Everywhere All at Once" that pushed Jamie Lee Curtis out of her comfort zone.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Did you understand that role?
Jamie Lee Curtis: Of course not--
Sharyn Alfonsi: When you got it?
Jamie Lee Curtis: Not one second of it. Did I understand that script? No.
Curtis says she did understand Deirdre Beaudbeirdre, the hardboiled bureaucrat from hell.
Jamie Lee Curtis: We all know Deidre. She's a woman who's not loved. She's a woman who uses her power in her job to control people because she has no love in her life.
Curtis was unrecognizable but her performance did not go unnoticed.
Sharyn Alfonsi and Jamie Lee Curtis
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Sharyn Alfonsi: Before the moment, though, first, when they call your name.
Jamie Lee Curtis: Yes
Sharyn Alfonsi: You say, I think? "Shut up."
Jamie Lee Curtis: "Shut up." Totally, because that wasn't supposed to happen.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Your mom never won an Oscar. Dad never won an Oscar.
Jamie Lee Curtis: No, they didn't. They were both nominated.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Does this make you feel like you're on even footing with your parents, who were these gigantic stars?
Jamie Lee Curtis: You know, I think about surpassing my parents, which I have, emotionally. I have surpassed my parents with sobriety. My mother was restricted by what the industry wanted from her, and expected from her, and would allow from her. My mother would have hated "The Last Showgirl" because I showed what I really looked like. And so I have, I don't wanna say, surpassed them, but I, I have freedom.
The morning after her Oscar win, a photographer asked Curtis to recreate a photo of actress Faye Dunaway and her statue from nearly 50 years ago. She agreed, with one condition.
Jamie Lee Curtis: And I said to him, "Yeah, but I won't do it seriously. We have to make it funny."
Jamie Lee Curtis hasn't just embraced imperfection, she's made it an art.
Produced by Michael Karzis. Associate producer, Katie Kerbstat. Broadcast associate, Erin DuCharme. Edited by Matthew Danowski.
Sharyn Alfonsi