1958-present
Latest News: Jamie Lee Curtis In Talks for Freaky Friday 2
Jamie Lee Curtis is on track to return to movie theaters this August, thanks to the upcoming film adaptation of the video game Borderlands. But she might also be returning to set soon. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 65-year-old Oscar winner is currently negotiating with Disney to reprise her role as family matriarch Tess Coleman for Freaky Friday 2.
The sequel to the mother-daughter comedy starring Curtis and Lindsey Lohan has a director and is moving forward more than 20 years after Freaky Friday became an unexpected success. Curtis discussed her enthusiasm about a sequel with The New York Times in May 2023. “As I went around the world with Halloween Ends, people wanted to know if there was going to be another Freaky Friday. Something really touched a chord,” she said. “When I came back, I called my friends at Disney and said, “It feels like there’s a movie to be made.” The studio is also negotiating with Lohan.
Curtis is seemingly onboard already. On March 29, she shared a photo of herself and Lohan on Instagram with the caption, “DUH! FFDEUX!” Fans quickly chimed in with excitement of their own. One commenter shared “So ready for the movie ❤❤❤” with another sharing “I can’t wait to see this sequel 😍.”
Who Is Jamie Lee Curtis?
The daughter of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis embarked on her own celebrated acting career by starring in the horror classic Halloween in 1978. She later drew favorable reviews for her roles in the comedies Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, True Lies, Freaky Friday, and Knives Out. In 2023, she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the sci-fi action/comedy movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. Married to fellow actor and filmmaker Christopher Guest, Curtis is also an acclaimed author of children’s books.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Jamie Lee Curtis
BORN: November 22, 1958
BIRTHPLACE: Los Angeles, California
PARENTS: Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh
SPOUSE: Christopher Guest (1984-present)
CHILDREN: Annie and Ruby
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Sagittarius
Early Years and Parents
Jamie Lee Curtis was born November 22, 1958, in Los Angeles, to actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. She has one sister and four half-siblings. Her parents divorced when she was 4, and she said Tony was “not interested in being a father” after the divorce; media reports stated he removed Curtis and her siblings from his will before he died.
Although introduced to show business an early age, Curtis didn’t immediately decide to become an actor. She was a cheerleader at the all-girls Westlake School in Los Angeles and graduated from the prestigious Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut in 1976.
Following a semester at the University of the Pacific, Curtis was convinced to audition for a role as teenage detective Nancy Drew. Although she didn’t get the part, she soon dropped out of school to pursue acting.
Halloween and Scream Queen Status
Curtis initially landed spots on such shows as Quincy M.E. and Columbo. She even earned a role on the short-lived military comedy television series Operation Petticoat, which was based on a 1959 film that starred her father. It turned out to be a false start. She barely got in one speaking line per episode before being dismissed, along with most of her castmates, at the end of its disappointing first season.
Curtis’ real breakthrough came in 1978, when the 19-year-old actor starred in John Carpenter’s classic horror movie Halloween. A low-budget flick about a psychopath who stalks a group of babysitters, there was no guarantee that this would resuscitate her fledgling career, and Carpenter didn’t even want her for the role, preferring actor Anne Lockhart for the part. But when Lockhart turned down the role, Carpenter warmed to Curtis after producers felt her family connection to Janet Leigh would invoke the iconic imagery of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho.
Halloween went on to gross $47 million over the course of its initial theatrical run, making it one of the most profitable movies in history based on initial investment. However, she found few job offers in the initial aftermath of the film’s unexpected success and struggled with typecasting in the horror genre. Her roles in Prom Night (1980), The Fog (1980), and Halloween II (1981) resulted in the actor becoming known as the “Scream Queen.”
On the small screen, Curtis showed her dramatic talents in Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story (1981). She played the title character, a Playboy model, who died at the hands of her abusive and controlling husband. Curtis also displayed her comic chops in the 1983 hit film Trading Places with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. Her portrayal of a soft-hearted sex worker helped take her career to a new level.
Curtis landed a number of leading film roles, with decidedly mixed results. She earned positive reviews for Love Letters (1983) and Grandview, U.S.A. (1984). Perfect (1985), however, proved to be anything but perfection. Starring opposite John Travolta, Curtis played an aerobics instructor in this box-office dud.
Rise to Stardom: True Lies, Revisiting Halloween, and Freaky Friday
Curtis enjoyed another wave of success in the late 1980s, starting with the acclaimed comedy A Fish Called Wanda (1988). She headlined the sitcom Anything But Love with comedian Richard Lewis from 1989 to 1992, earning a Golden Globe Award for her work in 1990. Curtis then showed another side of her acting abilities by starring alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in the action-adventure romp True Lies (1994). She portrayed Helen Tasker, a bored housewife who learns her husband is actually a secret government agent and quickly becomes embroiled in a deadly terrorist plot.
The performance earned her a second Golden Globe, and True Lies became one of the biggest box office hits of the 1990s, grossing more than $365 million internationally. She called the film “without question, the greatest experience of my professional life so far.” But the success of True Lies failed to immediately boost Curtis’ career as one might expect, and the movies she made in the years following True Lies were among the biggest critical and commercial failures of her career, including Fierce Creatures (1997) and Virus (1999).
Curtis orchestrated her own career comeback by returning to her horror roots, pitching the idea for what became Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998). Curtis was the star and an uncredited executive producer. Despite negative reviews, Halloween H20 was a box office success and “a personal triumph for Curtis, if not as an actress then certainly as a businesswoman,” wrote David Grove, author of the biography Jamie Lee Curtis: Scream Queen. She also reprised her role of Laurie Strode in Halloween: Resurrection (2002).
Her comeback was complete when Curtis was approached to replace Annette Bening, who had just dropped out of the production of Freaky Friday (2003). Curtis co-starred with Lindsay Lohan in the live-action Disney film about a mother and daughter who switch bodies. Freaky Friday became an unexpected commercial success, earning more than $160 million on a budget of just $20 million. Curtis received particular praise, earning another Golden Globe nomination as well as some of her best reviews.
Semi-Retirement and Return to Acting
Curtis' screen appearances dwindled after Christmas with the Kranks (2004), and she primarily became known as the spokesperson for Activia yogurt for several years. In 2006, Curtis announced she had retired from acting to focus on her family and her career as a picture book author. Still, she occasionally surfaced for parts in generally lighthearted fare, including Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008) and You Again (2010).
Starting in 2012, Curtis popped up in recurring roles on popular TV programs such as NCIS and New Girl. Fittingly, she made a full-time return to TV in 2015 with Scream Queens, playing the dean of a university terrorized by a serial killer. That year, Curtis also starred in Spare Parts, a drama based on the real-life story of four high school students who enter a robotics competition.
Forty years after her big screen debut as Laurie Strode in one of horror’s classic films, Curtis faced the evil Mike Myers once again in a new Halloween (2018). This time, the actor said, her character has readied herself to take on her longtime nemesis. “In this case, she is well-matched, she is prepared, she is focused,” said Curtis. “She will be the one people are standing behind when that moment comes, because she’s the one ready.” The film drew critical acclaim for Curtis and was a commercial success, earning $77.5 million in its opening weekend—a historic performance for a movie starring an actress over the age of 55.
Late Career Surge and Oscar Win
In 2019, Curtis joined the star-studded ensemble of the murder-mystery Knives Out, which earned more than $300 million globally at the box office. Two years later, she received the prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival. “Jamie Lee Curtis belongs to that rarefied group of Hollywood actors who best reflect the qualities that are the very soul of the global film industry and its legacy,” festival director Alberto Barbera said.
Curtis returned to the Halloween franchise with the sequels Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022), both of which were commercial successes. Curtis said the latter film would be her last time portraying Laurie Strode, going so far as to sign a fake contract to that effect.
Also in 2022, Curtis starred in the sci-fi action/comedy film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), portraying IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre, who alternatively serves as adversary, friend, and lover to star Michelle Yeoh in various alternate dimensions. The unusual and widely celebrated film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Curtis winning both the Oscar and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress, her first time winning both awards. “To all of the people who have supported the genre movies that I have made for all of these years, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, we just won an Oscar together,” she said during her Academy Award acceptance speech.
Most recently, Curtis returned to television with her guest role on Season 2 of the acclaimed Hulu series The Bear. She played Donna Berzatto, mother of the protagonist played by Jeremy Allen White. She also had a part in Haunted Mansion (2023), a family-friendly flick based on the amusement park ride at Walt Disney World and Disneyland that largely flopped. Up next, Curtis will portray the eccentric researcher Patricia Tannis in the upcoming Eli Roth–directed film adaptation of the video game Borderlands. The movie is scheduled for an August 9, 2024, theatrical release.
Husband and Daughters
Curtis has been married to actor and filmmaker Christopher Guest since 1984. Curtis saw a picture of him in Rolling Stone magazine promoting his film This is Spinal Tap (1984) and told a friend, “Oh, I’m going to marry that guy.” They met in June of that year and wed four months later in December.
Curtis and Guest adopted two daughters, Annie and Ruby. Raising them from birth, Annie was born in December 1986 and Ruby in March 1996. Both daughters were married in their family’s backyard, and Curtis officiated the wedding for Ruby, who is transgender.
Net Worth
Curtis and her husband, Christopher Guest, are reported to have a net worth of $60 million.
Curtis’ earliest roles didn’t earn her much. “The truth of the matter is, I didn’t really make much money off of the horror movies,” she told Variety. But that’s changed as her star power has grown. Curtis also created Comet Pictures, a production company, and is a best-selling author.
Children’s Books
Curtis is one of the few celebrity writers to win over both critics and readers. She has enjoyed tremendous success as a children’s book author. Her first children’s work, When I Was Little: A Four-Year-Old’s Memoir of Her Youth, was published in 1993. The adoption of their oldest child, Annie, led to her second book, Tell Me Again About The Night I Was Born (1996).
Other books include Today I Feel Silly: And Other Moods That Make My Day (1998), Is There Really a Human Race? (2006), My Mommy Hung the Moon: A Love Story (2010), and My Brave Year of Firsts (2016), Me, Myselfie & I: A Cautionary Tale (2018), and Just One More Sleep (2024).
Quotes
- I’ve always said that I have the longest middle name. There goes Jamie Janet-Leigh-and-Tony-Curtis’s-Daughter Curtis.
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Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy. He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.
