Jamie Lee Curtis's difficult relationship with her parents has been a heavy backpack that she has never let go of due to how the marriage of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, two of the undisputed stars of Hollywood in the sixties.
Jamie Lee Curtis has been at the foot of the canyon on the big screen for decades, she is a children's story writer, producer, and activist committed to feminism. Her role as Laurie Strode at just 20 years old in John Carpenter's Halloween Night made her "a horror movie icon." She has never strayed away from the cameras, however, for about 10 years her film career has been even stronger. In 2022 she received the Honorary Golden Lion in Venice, she went up barefoot to collect the award and dedicated it to people who suffer violence.
Jamie Lee Curtis's parents' marriage breaks up after her birth
Jamie Lee Curtis's story began on November 22, 1958, when she came into the world in Santa Monica, California. Two years before her, her sister Kelly Curtis was born. Her parents, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were two movie greats, they had married in 1951 and were considered the perfect and happiest couple in Hollywood.
Janet Leigh was born in California in the 1920s and her fame spread thanks to her role in Alfred Hitchcock's terrifying film Psycho in 1960. She became a legend and made her daughter, then only two years old, followed in his footsteps in this film genre. Her marriage to Tony Curtis must have been the opposite of an idyllic relationship.
Tony Curtis was actually called Bernard Schwartz, he was born in 1925 and was the son of an immigrant couple trying to get ahead in the Bronx neighborhood. When he married Janet Leigh he too was a big-screen phenomenon. In 1959, the incredible and fabulous film With Skirts and Crazy, by Billy Wilder, was released, where he met Marilyn Monroe. A year earlier Jamie Lee Curtis had been born, who has said on several occasions that it was an attempt to save a relationship that was failing everywhere. Tony and Marilyn continued to see each other after filming, she even got pregnant, but she lost the baby.
A few years later, Tony fell in love with the German actress Christine Kaufmann, who was 17 years old at the time, during the filming of Taras Bulba in Argentina. In 1962 he filed for divorce from Janet Leigh. He married that young woman as soon as he came of age and they had two daughters: Alexandra and Allegra. Jamie had stayed with her sister and her mother, who also remarried for the fourth time to Robert Brandt that same year of divorce.
The two sisters lived under the strict rules of their mother and stepfather, who was a stockbroker, but they had a privileged and stable childhood in addition to attending the best schools in Los Angeles and Connecticut. Of course, since the divorce, they were totally away from the famous actor while he began to accumulate marriages. He married four more times and added two more children to the family, Nicolás and Benjamin.
At the age of 85, Tony Curtis died of heart failure. He succeeded in October 2010. A few months earlier he had disinherited his six children without explanation. Supposedly, most of his estate went to Jill, his last wife whom he married in 1998.
Tony Curtis never practiced as a father
The same month of October, after the death of the actor, the talk show The View on ABC invited Jamie Lee Curtis to the set. She confessed that he “wasn't a father and wasn't interested in being one. He did what he was supposed to do from a financial standpoint, which was honorable. But he wasn't an involved father and therefore I look at him from the same perspective as all of you: a fan of his." She also pointed out that her parents "hated each other" her entire life and she had to grow up with that hatred around her.
A year after the death of Tony Curtis, Allegra, one of the daughters of his second marriage, published the book Me and My Father. In it she narrates that he was “a funny, affectionate man, he always supported me and encouraged me to face challenges, but he never wanted to face problems, neither his wife's nor his children's, nor his own. He was always afraid of getting old, he was afraid that his career would end ”.
To these insecurities and depressive episodes was added the consumption of alcohol, drugs, and other substances from a very young age with which he tried to compensate for all that. Many professional colleagues accompanied him on those experiences, the problem is that it took him too long to get out. According to Allegra Curtis assured during the presentation of the book, from the age of 7 to 16 he lived with his father or rather took care of him according to his customs. “In the late 1970s and early 1980s it was completely normal for everyone to smoke weed and take amphetamines and downers,” Allegra said.
Jamie Lee Curtis, I have explained more than once that he knew about his father's addictions. He also recounted that she was addicted to Vicodin for ten years, a pain reliever that she began to take to ease the pain caused by plastic surgery to remove eye bags. At that time, according to what she published in a magazine, she came to share drugs with her father on one occasion. He had been absent all her life, but now Jamie was the only one of that motley family with whom she was in a relationship. Drugs hit the Curtis clan hard because Nicholas, the fifth son of Tony Curtis, died of a heroin overdose at the age of 21.
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis married Christopher Guest in 1984 and they have two children, Annie and Ruby. Both show in public everything that unites them. He even recorded a video of Jamie, which was later posted on her social networks, from the moment she found out that she had been nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for this 95th edition. In one of her most recent statements, she stressed that in recent years she feels "the freedom to live authentically in the moment and be open to whatever arises" and that now she is going through a "constant metamorphosis".
