It took more than four decades for the Everything Everywhere All At Once star to receive her first Oscar nomination. Not that she needed it. Photo / Getty Images
“Ladies,” Michelle Yeoh counselled from the Dolby Theatre stage, “Don’t let anybody tell you you are ever past your prime.”
Viewers naturally assumed the 60-year-old actress was referring to the dearth of roles for mature women in Hollywood generally. But she might as well have been speaking directly to her fellow Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis, who at 64 had just become the eighth-oldest winner in Academy history of the Best Supporting Actress prize.
Surprisingly, this was the first time Curtis had been so much as nominated by the Academy in a career spanning more than four decades. And that statistic gave her award the air of a “career Oscar”: that is, an appreciation by proxy for her entire body of work. In other words, the business likes her, really likes her - and has done since she first stole onto the scene in John Carpenter’s classic slasher Halloween, with a kitchen knife clenched in her fist.
But they just couldn’t find a credible excuse to tell her so until Everything Everywhere All at Once came along, which - while hardly conveyor belt Oscar bait - is easier for Academy members to vote for than innumerable horror sequels, or a US$100 million ($160m) Arnold Schwarzenegger-led spy caper (True Lies), or the raucous life-swap comedy in which she plays a call girl with a ruched pink bodycon dress that burned itself onto the hippocampus of every teenage boy who saw it. (That one was Trading Places, and at least she won a Bafta for that.)
Still, when Curtis took to the stage of the Dolby Theatre, her hodgepodge CV was one of the first things to which she paid tribute.
“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. And reasonably so. After all, if the Hollywood crème-de-la-crème types cheering this respectable role (well, semi-respectable) had thought to write her at least one other at some point in the last 45 years, her moment of recognition might not have been quite so long-awaited.
Jamie Lee Curtis accepts the #Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. https://t.co/ndiKiHfmID pic.twitter.com/bGBtrI3k0g
— Variety (@Variety) March 13, 2023
The daughter of movie stars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh - themselves both nominated for Oscars in their time - Curtis didn’t inherit her parents’ air of golden-age glamour. But on screen she was earthy, brisk and heedless - and also naturally sympathetic, unless she was trying to be otherwise.
That was what made her an ideal foil for the controlled, steely Yeoh in Everything Everywhere, and indeed throughout the film’s entire awards campaign. An image of her roar of triumph at the Golden Globes when Yeoh’s name was read out at that ceremony went viral, which within days was being printed on t-shirts: Curtis later posted a picture of herself wearing one on Instagram, with the hashtag #friendssupportingfriends.
In fact, in an age of carefully-curated social media presences, Curtis’s Instagram musings are entirely unfiltered. Among formal and candid photographs, her busy feed is peppered with newspaper clippings and photographs of rescue dogs in need of rehoming, while featuring captions that have been known to run on for hundreds of words and lapse in and out of capital letters en route.
“Is it JUST me?” she wrote last May on a post that juxtaposed the new parallel-universe-hopping Doctor Strange film with Everything Everywhere, to which that Marvel blockbuster was widely (and unfavourably) compared. “Does it seem STRANGE that our tiny movie that could and did and continues to do ##1movieinamerica and is TRULY MARVELOUS, out-marvels any Marvel movie they put out there.”
“COMPETITIVE? F*** YES,” she added later that day: “I wasn’t head cheerleader in high school for nothing.” “#guessiwillneverbecastinamarvelmovie”, the post concluded.
Few actors on any tier of fame would dare cheese off the current source of Hollywood’s most lucrative repeat gigs, but Curtis is both experienced and wise enough not to care.
Curtis has never made any bones about her break in Hollywood being hereditary. Again, on Instagram, she recently described herself as “an OG [original] nepo baby,” and credited her parents in her Oscar acceptance speech. But while she was chosen to play the heroine in the original 1978 Halloween primarily for her family connections - 18 years earlier, her mother had played Marion Crane, the multiply punctured victim of Norman Bates, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho - she was so perfect in the role, her casting immediately looked like more than a publicity coup.
After her first star-making performance as Laurie Strode, survivor of Michael Myers’ bloodthirsty rampage, a string of further horrors followed, including two Halloween sequels, which cemented her as the preeminent scream queen of the early 1980s.
Trading Places, in which she starred opposite Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in 1983, proved she could do comedy, as did A Fish Called Wanda in 1988. (Between the two she married the great comic actor and filmmaker Christopher Guest, of This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show fame, who also happens to be a hereditary peer. Baron and Baroness Haden-Guest, to give them their proper titles, will celebrate their 40th anniversary next year.)
She was directed by Kathryn Bigelow in Blue Steel, James Cameron in True Lies, and John Boorman in The Tailor of Panama. And the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday, in which she starred at the age of 45 opposite Lindsay Lohan, gave her an ideal transitional role from starlet to seasoned actress. But still, Hollywood couldn’t quite work out what to do with her. Another flurry of minor comic and dramatic roles followed, as well as yet more Halloween sequels, but nothing of substance until her supporting role in Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunit Knives Out.
Two of this year’s other acting Oscar winners, Brendan Fraser and Ke Huy Quan, built their respective campaigns around their own career comebacks. Fraser, 54, had spent the entire last decade on the fringes of the industry before being cast in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. And Quan, 51, had to decamp to Hong Kong to work as a fight choreographer after work dried up for the former child star in the early 1990s.
Could Curtis have spun her own narrative as a return from the fringes? Perhaps, but you sense she was equally happy pottering around there as she was in the spotlight. If Hollywood’s prestige wing regrets not taking a risk on her until her mid-60s, it really only has itself to blame.