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In her wide-ranging 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Jamie Lee Curtis talked about the days post-Halloween
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The actress said roles weren’t exactly rolling in, but she did get to work with her mother, actress Janet Leigh, in an episode of The Love Boat
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Curtis acknowledged her parents’ jobs as actors helped her in Hollywood, but her auditions were what got her the real roles
Jamie Lee Curtis arguably broke out in 1978’s horror classic Halloween, but she says her next “big” role wasn’t exactly the biggest.
“My big break after Halloween was, I was on Love Boat with Janet Leigh, beautiful Janet Leigh playing my mother,” Curtis said of her real-life actress mom. “Then I was in a Charlie’s Angels episode where I played Cheryl Ladd’s best friend, pro golfer. So those are the two jobs I got post-Halloween.“
On the 1978 episode of The Love Boat, “Chubs/Locked Away/Till Death Do Us Part – Maybe,” Curtis played newlywed Linda, contemplating divorce after sparring with husband Wayne (Peter Coffield). Her divorced parents, Les (Conrad Bain) and Gail (Leigh), drop in on them somewhat unexpectedly, leading them to reconcile while stuck on the ship as Linda and Wayne move closer to a split.
Acknowledging that her mom and dad Tony Curtis’ status in Hollywood likely helped her career in part, she noted she was “doing her thing” when she began acting, and it was her auditions that got her to the final two candidates for Halloween.
“This was a $300,000 horror movie, this was not a job that a lot of people wanted,” Curtis, 66, said. The film ultimately made $47 million and became a multi-movie franchise.
The Oscar winner said her life “hinged on a couple seconds I never saw coming,” after a friend suggested she audition for Universal while home on a break from college.
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“I never thought I’d be an actor in my life,” she said. “My teeth were the color of concrete; they were gray. I was cute but not pretty. And so I never saw that coming.”
Though she actually wanted to be a cop after finishing college, she went to the Universal audition, and “they called me the next day and gave me a seven-year contract … and I quit college.” Not long after, she’d land Halloween at just 19 years old.
Funny enough, Curtis confirmed the rumor that she doesn’t like scary movies, because, as she said, “life is scary.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Curtis spoke about the painful reason she first decided to get plastic surgery in her younger years (a comment made about her appearance on set) and the choice to take on her famous commercial roles of the 1990s and 2000s: “For the most part, because they allowed me to stay home with my kids,” the mom-of-two said.
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