SCREAM QUEEN
Jamie Lee Curtis returns to the new Halloween and embraces her horror-ific roots.
This may come as a shock, but Jamie Lee Curtis is not a fan of horror films, never really cut loose on Halloween night and doesn’t particularly like being scared. Yes, that Jamie Lee Curtis, who was catapulted to stardom in the horror classic Halloween 40 years ago, who became a teenage scream queen—the first, really—in the movie that launched a whole new genre of contemporary horror about young people terrorized by boogeymen. She returns to the throne in grand form this month in the new Halloween (Oct. 19), as Laurie Strode, the same iconic character she played in the first film. And once more, she’s locked in a desperate struggle with the masked, almost supernatural Michael Myers, who just keeps coming back, again and again, to finish what he started back in 1978. Curtis has appeared in four other sequels to the original film and, after “surviving” the first night stalking by Myers, went on to appear in other horror flicks, including The Fog, Prom Night and Terror Train (all released in 1980). Then, as recently as 2015, she delighted viewers in a regular role as Dean Cathy Munsch on TV’s campyvampy Scream Queens. Certainly, she made numerous delightful, non-horror movies too—including Trading Places (1983), True Lies (1994), A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Freaky Friday (2003). But she clearly knows where her bread is buttered. Everything in her life, she says, is “the direct result” of Halloween and its scary spawn. “Every good thing that ever happened to me,” says Curtis, 59, “was because I was in horror films.” But she’s never really been a fan of things that go bump in the night. “I don’t love the genre,” she says of fright flicks. “But I’m grateful to the genre.”
Hollywood Kid
We are relaxing in the kitchen of her spacious, white-on-white house on the west side of Los Angeles. It’s not far from where Curtis grew up, across town in Palm Springs, with her two famous parents, actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. But even though her parents were Hollywood royalty, their seemingly picture-perfect marriage was on the rocks by the time Jamie came along in 1958 to join her sister, Kelly, older by two years. Part of the friction might have been the frustration they felt at the lack of professional recognition from Hollywood, she says. There were no Oscars on their mantelpiece, in spite of her parents’ success and popularity. For
her memorable role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, her mom received fame and an Oscar nomination, but did not win. Her father, who acted in more than 100 films, was acclaimed for his roles in Spartacus, The Boston Strangler, Some Like It Hot and The Defiant Ones, among many others, but got few nominations and no wins. “I think both of my parents were disappointed,” she says. “His disappointment turned sour and hers got quiet.The greatest lesson I got is [an award] can’t be the goal, because you will always be disappointed.” Halloween at her house was never a big deal—certainly nothing to suggest she’d ever become the queen of the haunted holiday. It was “fun to put on costumes and run around,” she says, but “I have no scary memories of Halloween.” Her mom remarried—to a non-actor, former U.S. Marine and later securities innovator Robert Brandt—and the union lasted 42 years, until Leigh’s death in 2004. Tony Curtis had five wives after Janet Leigh, and wasn’t around much, she says.
Acting by Accident
After high school, Curtis enrolled in a local college, the University of the Pacific, but she didn’t stay long. “I left college in six months and became an actress by accident—by accident! I was gonna