In a rarefied life, it is the mundane moments that offer the greatest clarity. A couple of weeks ago, Jamie Lee Curtis, who has lived all of her 46 years nestled within the fake but cushy bosom of Hollywood, sat in a high-school gymnasium mulling the ephemeral nature of life, and feeling a little bit blue.
Down on the floor, her 18-year-old daughter Annie bounced around the court with her volleyball teammates as they tried unsuccessfully to avert a loss in the season's closing tournament. Curtis serves as the team's mother hen, cheering on the kids and making sure their needs are met. But after years of tailoring her work schedule to make it to every home and away game that she could manage, it dawned on Curtis that her daughter's graduation next spring meant her own career as a team mom was winding down with the final seconds on the clock. "I knew at that moment that it was the last volleyball game that I probably would ever be a part of," she says wistfully. "And it was very sad, because that was a really big part of my life."
But don't think the end of extracurricular volleyball is going to mean a sudden boost in Curtis's availability for film projects, which currently average about one a year, including tomorrow's release of Christmas with the Kranks. In fact, she's about to take a long hiatus from the movies. Her daughter may be headed to college, but her son is only nine years old, and Curtis wants to devote herself to being a full-time mom.
"I really feel that the balance in my life has now shifted almost exclusively to my family," says Curtis. She is kneeling on the floor of a hotel suite in front of a coffee table, shoes off, scarfing down a fast veggie burger with Swiss cheese. "I now want to make the choice of being there the predominant amount of time. It's as simple as that. I'll never regret that, ever."
This isn't the first time Curtis has swum against the Hollywood current. When fashion reporters covering awards galas stop her on the red carpet to drill her on who she's wearing, she hands them what she calls the Jamie Lee Curtis Credit Card, a business card containing all the information they want to know. It may not do the sound-bite-driven TV producers any good, but she doesn't want to play their game. "It's become that you're a spokesperson for the various people whose free clothing you're wearing, and I don't like that," she says. "I give them the card, and then I don't feel like I'm only talking about other people, when I'm really there to talk about some work I've done."
Not that she wears much donated clothing, anyway. First, she is something of a fashion misfit.
"My entire closet is black," she says, waving a hand across today's ensemble of tapered black skirt and high-collared black jacket, set off with a garnet-coloured pin on her chest that is the size of a sunflower. Her black hair is short and gender neutral, with a touch of Susan Sontag-distinguished grey above her right eye. "I just had no fashion sense at all, and I found out you could wear black and buy one thing, whatever the new trend is, in black. That's it."
Second, Curtis rarely accepts gifts, since she doesn't want to feel beholden to anyone. It is a point of pride for her: She points at her clothing and possessions, and snaps, "Bought it." (A black handbag.) "Bought it." (A silver Treeo.) A pair of black Manolos droops off two fingers. "Bought 'em."
This is the sort of coolly unassuming approach to celebrity that comes from being second-generation royalty. The daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, who died in early October, Jamie Lee Curtis is the Hollywood equivalent of Old Money. She sagely recognizes the perks of celebrity as the dangerous quid pro quo that they are, and evidently doesn't feel that she needs to continually reinforce her own celebrity status, as some stars do. When room service delivered that veggie burger a few minutes earlier, Curtis took care to engage the waiter and then thanked him by name when he departed. This is the sort of noblesse oblige attitude she picked up from Leigh.
Her mother, she recalls, "had a professional ethic that was rigid and fabulous. Just in terms of how she approached each day of work -- which was: 'Be grateful for every single thing you have. Never be late. Know everyone's name. Never leave the set. Don't go to your trailer. Know every line of the script, even though it's not the scene you're shooting. Never cut in line at the lunch line. Never ask for special circumstances.' If that sort of behaviour in Hollywood makes people think you're something of a freak, so be it."
Curtis's position as a skeptical insider enables her to take some risks that less confident actresses would never dare. In Christmas with the Kranks, Curtis and Tim Allen play a middle-aged couple with a newly empty nest who decide to opt out of the holiday season's festivities to put their money toward a 10-day luxury cruise. Curtis offers herself up as a comic sacrificial lamb, stuffed into a too-small yellow bikini for a humiliating scene at a tanning salon.
"Oh, I look ridiculous. I revel in that, because that's the point," she says now. "I told the cameraman, put the lights up high, make the light bad, let's not make 'em beautiful, let's make 'em look ugly."
But she's always been game to offer herself up for the amusement of the audience, whether as the scream queen in the seminal 1978 horror flick Halloween and its literal or spiritual sequels, or her clumsy striptease in True Lies. While she takes her job seriously, she doesn't harbour any illusion that she is engaged in making art.
"Sally Mann is an artist," says Curtis, referring to one of the many photographers whose work she collects. But as for her own film work, "I call it entertainment," she says flatly. "I'm not going to call horror movies 'art.' They're horror movies. They're entertainment. They're a distraction."
Which brings us back to Christmas with the Kranks. Curtis admits it isn't likely to get a rave review from her husband, the dry-witted actor/filmmaker Christopher Guest ( A Mighty Wind).
"I think he'll be very lovingly complimentary of my work, and Tim's. But I don't think it's his style of film, I don't think it's what drives him, it's not going to be his comic sensibility, so I can't pretend and expect Chris to give it his big endorsement. But it doesn't matter. Chris isn't the audience for this movie, at all."
Curtis took the role because Kranks is the sort of light fare she thinks is too rare, a movie that the whole family can safely see together.
So what if it's not art? Plenty of great artists are terrible human beings, she says.
"The primary way to be judged, in my eyes, is how you are as a parent to your children, and the sacrifices you make for them, and the choices you make and the changes you make in the course of your life as you notice you're off track," she says.
"I subscribe to one simple theory," continues Curtis. "It's about two questions to ask at the end of your life: 'Did I learn to live wisely?' And 'Did I love well?' That's it, I've boiled my life down to those two questions, and if I lived up to 40 years without asking those questions, I'm going to live 40 years asking those questions."
Simon Houpt