Jamie Lee Curtis never thought she’d be an actor, despite being born into Hollywood royalty

Jamie Lee Curtis was raised in the bosom of cinema royalty, her father was screen idol Tony Curtis and her mother, actress Janet Leigh, famously starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Psycho.” 

Despite that, she says she never thought she’d be an actor. 

“My life hinged on a couple seconds I never saw coming,” Curtis, now 66, said. 

Landing her first feature film at 19 years old

Curtis planned on being a cop. But, while home from college, a friend convinced Curtis to audition for Universal Studios.

“I did the scene. And she said, ‘That was very good’ whatever,” Curtis said. “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.'”

She got a seven-year contract the next day and quit college. Almost immediately, Curtis booked the 1978 horror film “Halloween.” She was cast as Laurie Strode, a bookish babysitter terrorized by an unrelenting killer named Michael Myers. 

Curtis acknowledges that her mother’s role in “Psycho” probably played a role in the casting decision, but said it was her auditions that landed her the lead in her first ever feature film.

“This was a $300,000 horror movie. This was not a job that a lot of people wanted,” she said. 

“Halloween” ended up grossing more than $70 million and became a cult classic, but it didn’t exactly launch Curtis’ career.

What Jamie Lee Curtis sees as her breakthrough role 

After booking “Halloween,” Curtis was on “Love Boat” with her mother, who played her mother. Curtis went on to star in “Halloween II” and other horror films, including “The Fog,” “Terror Train” and “Prom Night.”

She became the scream queen of the generation, but it was her first comedy feature, “Trading Places,” directed by John Landis, that Curtis said really launched her career. In it, she held her own next to Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, playing Ophelia, the wise, kind-hearted street walker.

“This is crucial, and this will make the piece,” Curtis said. “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. For sure,” she said.

Perfect

By the mid-80s, 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. Curtis played an aerobics instructor. 

“And of course I look really good in a leotard,” she said. “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. She was 25 and he called her out for baggy eyes, refusing to shoot her.

“For him to say that was very embarrassing. So as soon as the movie finished I ended up having some plastic surgery,” she said.

 Curtis started taking pain killers afterwards. 

“I became very enamored with the warm bath of an opiate, drank a little bit — never to excess, never any big public demonstrations, very quiet, very private about it but it became a dependency for sure,” she said. 

Curtis said she’s been sober for 26 years.

60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi asked Curtis if she was worried sharing the story of her addiction would impact her career. 

“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,” Curtis said. “I make the joke. It’s a funny joke. But it’s true.”

Curtis’ family 

That yogurt commercial, which was later parodied by “Saturday Night Live,” wasn’t her only commercial. Curtis, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood after “True Lies” made roughly $400 million, also did commercials for pantyhose and rental cars. 

“For the most part because they allowed me to stay home with my kids,” Curtis said. “I am an imperfect, you know, working mom. Because no working moms are perfect.”

Curtis has two children with Christopher Guest, the actor and director best known for the  “This is Spinal Tap.” They’ve been married for more than 40 years.

“My mother was married four times. My father was married five times. That’s nine,” Curtis said. “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,’ you know, it was important to me that I stay married to my husband, that he’s my husband.”

A comeback for Curtis 

Once their kids were grown up, Curtis traded in carpool duty for unapologetically driving her own career. Curtis now runs her own production company, Comet Pictures, which has a TV series in the works starring Nicole Kidman, called “Scarpetta,” and a feature film coming up about the catastrophic Paradise wildfires in 2018, called “The Lost Bus.”

She’s written more than a dozen best-selling children’s books, including some best sellers, and also runs her own charity, called My Hand in Yours, which has raised over $1 million for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Curtis donated another million to victims of the recent wildfires, which destroyed much of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, including the 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 with “Halloween Ends.”

But it was a string of raw, vulnerable characters that came to Curtis in her 60s that’s 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.”

“I’ve waited my whole life for Donna, patiently, quietly cooking. My own creative mental life, my own, you know, my own alcoholism,” Curtis said. “It’s just so beautifully written that you don’t have to do anything.”

In 2022’s mystical, somewhat, mind-bending “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Curtis was unrecognizable as hardboiled bureaucrat Deirdre Beaubeirdre. The performance won her an Oscar —  neither of her parents ever won, though they were both nominated for the award. 

“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,” Curtis said. “And so I have, I don’t wanna say, surpassed them, but I have freedom.”

That freedom was on display 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. Curtis agreed, with one condition. 

“I said to him, ‘Yeah, but I won’t do it seriously. We have to make it funny.'”

Sharyn Alfonsi

Sharyn Alfonsi is an award-winning correspondent for 60 Minutes.