The words of rejection still carved into Jamie Lee’s heart

AMIE Lee Curtis is trying to work out how many marriages her parents had. Between her father, Tony Curtis, her mother, Janet Leigh, and Janet’s fourth and final husband, handsome stockbroker Robert Brandt – who was Jamie’s much- loved stepfather – the tally is fairly impressive.

“I think there are 11 between them,” she says, frowning a little bemusedly. “Hold on… Tony had five, Janet had four, so that’s nine. And Bob had four. Is that 12? Eleven or 12? Twelve marriages between this immediate family of mine.”

In fact, she’s underestimating. Tony Curtis, star of classic movies such as Some Like It Hot, was actually married six times, not five; and if she’s correct about Bob Brandt’s history, that brings the total to a jawdropping 14.

If she is confused, however, it’s only understandable. Besides, Janet’s and Bob’s other marriages were firmly in the past while she was growing up, while Tony, famously, continued leaping into and out of the marital state until he died in 2010.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” she says of her serial monogamist father. “I didn’t grow up with him, I barely saw him, I barely knew him. I lived a very quiet, funny, almost country kind of life up in Benedict Canyon [ Los Angeles] with my mom and my stepfather, and I didn’t know Tony really.”

One particular memory stands out – possibly because it was the only piece of parental wisdom that he ever shared with her.

“I remember once driving with him in his convertible Rolls Royce,” she says. “I was an actress at that point, so I must have been 19. We were driving through Los Angeles, and I remember we pulled up to a stoplight and he looked at me and said, ‘ Never let them shoot you with anything less than a 50 [ millimetre lens].’

“Then we drove off. I remember sitting there going, ‘ OK, Dad.’ That was his big piece of fatherly advice to me.”

SHE admits that, when she was growing up, having famous parents was, to say the least of it, a mixed blessing. And parents don’t come much more famous than Jamie’s. Tony starred in every thing from Spartacus to the long- running TV series The Persuaders.

Janet was one of MGM’s biggest stars, appearing in films such as Little Women to Touch of Evil. But she remains best known for her Academy Award- winning performance as Marion Crane, the girl who comes to grief in the Psycho shower scene.

And that level of celebrity made life tough for their daughter growing up.

“It’s like a bad fart smell that follows you around,” she says, with disarming frankness. “And the thing is, it’s not your attachment to the fame that does it, it’s other people who catch a whiff of it, so it’s not even that you’re making a big deal of it, they are.

“You’re not making a big deal of saying, ‘ Tony Curtis was just sitting there,’ because he’s just your dad, but for them he’s not their dad, he’s Tony Curtis. “And then then, when we all get to be teenagers, it gets so much worse because we’re all trying to one- up each other just to get a foothold in life, just to get a little purchase over somebody else in order to survive in the universe of teenhood.

“So if you happen to have a famous parent, they like to stick the knife in and twist it – they like to remind you that you’re not special, or they tell you, ‘ Oh, you only get what you get because your parents are special.’

“There’s a lot of, ‘ You don’t have any talent, you only got what you got because your parents are famous.’ They either claim that you’re treated like someone special because of your parents, or they take away what’s special in you – also because of your parents. It can be very coercive.”

Especially when one of them rarely

POOL OF TALENT: Tony and Janet with Jamie Lee and her older sister Kelly

around to help you deal with it, although that’s not to say she grew up without any memories of her father.

“There was a summer when my sister Kelly was 15, I was 12, and we went to visit Tony and his new wife Leslie Allen and they had a little baby boy, my brother Nicholas, who has now passed on but he was a little baby then.

“My dad was living in London, where he was shooting the TV show The Persuaders with Roger Moore, and he was living in this gorgeous townhouse – just gorgeous – on Chester Square, and he had a convertible Rolls Royce parked out front.”

That the summer, she recalls, did not start out well. “My dad was going off to work with Roger Moore every day – I remember he had a really great time on that show.

“My sister was into make- up and clothes – she was totally into Biba cosmetics – and she and Leslie were not that far apart in age,

Leslie may have been 24, so they were about 10 years apart. So she and Leslie would go off every day and do that stuff.

“I was a tomboy, I had nowhere to go, I didn’t like London. I remember sitting in this house with the baby while everyone else was off having a great time and hating everybody.”

And then they all went on holiday Sardinia and everything changed.

“We’d rented a house and we put the car on a ferry and drove there. I remember the day we arrived at this rental house at the edge of the cliffs – there were cliffs, not beaches and it was all a little rugged, and we got there and Kelly and Leslie were making house and doing that thing, and my dad said, ‘ Who wants to go swimming?’

“I said, ‘ I do!’ We didn’t have our luggage yet, but he ripped off his clothes – he was wearing some tighty whities – and I ripped off my clothes – I was wearing a pair of underwear – and we dove into the water right off that little point where we were, and we swam in that gorgeous water. And it was glorious.”

For the rest of that trip, she and her father finally bonded over their shared love of to