Sunny Side Up: An Interview with Jamie Lee Curtis

At Jamie Lee Curtis´s Home
"Hello!" comes a voice from above. I look up and see a head popping out of a second-story window. "It´s me," Jamie Lee Curtis says. "Would you mind moving your car away from the garage, in case my husband needs to get out?"

I tell her sure thing, enjoying the neighborly feel of the exchange. Her home is on an unassuming street in Santa Monica, shady, blooming with vines, with a sign nailed to a tree at the bend in the driveway: "Caution: Please do not squish the small black dog." (The word "small" has been crossed out, replaced by "chubby.")

Curtis´s elder sister, Kelly, emerges from beyond a hedge, introducing herself as Jamie´s assistant or, more accurately, "assisteraunt," which is how her business card reads. She introduces me to Frances, the decidedly chubby black mutt, and Henry, a yellow Lab pal, and I´m whisked into the house, a place of high energy, big thoughts, no nonsense, all business and yet, somehow, tremendous warmth.

When I see Curtis I´m taken aback. She´s, well, thin. She certainly didn´t look like this for her last cinematic outing, 2004´s Christmas with the Kranks. Not skinny, but very trim, glowing with the healthy good looks of someone who works out and eats smart. Dressed in clingy black, she looks pretty amazing.

At 48 she still sports her signature short pixie cut, unabashedly silver. If she wears any makeup I don´t detect it, and her only jewelry is a wedding ring -- she has been married to actor and "mockumentary" film director Christopher Guest for 22 years -- and a necklace medallion etched with the names of her children, Annie, 20, and Thomas, 11.

What do you say to a woman who has lost weight and looks terrific? If you say "you look great!" would it mean you didn´t think she looked good before?

Not that she really gives me a chance to say much of anything. "Come on," she says, "let me show you around." She takes my purse. "I love this purse!" she says, slinging it over her shoulder. It´s large, in shiny patent leather, vaguely obnoxious but, I thought when I bought it, in a cool kind of way. "Kelly! Look at this!" she says to her sister. Jamie models it and Kelly applauds. Now they both want one. "We could have a club!" Jamie says, inviting me into the sister laughter the two have obviously shared forever.

Motherhood and Work
Born and bred in Hollywood, with famous parents -- the legendary Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis -- she broke into films in 1978 in Halloween, transforming herself over the years by turns into vixen and comic and dramatic actor in such films as Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, True Lies, Freaky Friday -- more than 35 movies in all. Recently she announced her decision to bow out of acting altogether, unless something comes along that´s not too time-consuming, shooting close to home, and doesn´t take her focus away from her family -- or her multiple charities. She´s keenly devoted to organizations serving the young and the ill, volunteering her time to many groups, including Children Affected by AIDS Foundation, Starlight Starbright Children´s Foundation, and What a Pair. It is perhaps with children that she has found her most authentic voice, having written seven popular children´s books that have spent as long as 37 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list.

I didn´t ask for a tour of her lovingly renovated, unpretentious 1920s Spanish-style house, but Curtis takes me through every bright and airy room, stopping short of the bedrooms, which, she decides, might be going too far. Nearly all of the walls feature large framed black-and-white photographs, most of which she has taken. "Put it this way," she says, "if there was another path for me, I would´ve been a photographer. I´ve taken photographs my whole life. Here´s my son´s and my feet, which I love. My little boy´s feet. And me. That´s my daughter. She´s really developed into an extraordinary dancer. She´s a sophomore at a college I can´t name. It´s somewhere where they grow corn. These are some of my favorite pictures, among the best I´ve ever taken. My daughter when she was 8. My son when he was a...when he was just a little sprite. Kills me." With zero prompting she talks about being an adoptive mom, about how it was to suddenly hold Annie, and later, Tom, and when I tell her I´ve got two adopted kids of my own she turns to me with eyes that are pure compassion. "Oh, so you know," she says. "You know."

With that I´m whisked quickly on past fish she can´t name, a photo of Nelson Mandela she pays tribute to, windows overlooking vines I´m told to note. "You´re throwing so much at me so quickly!" I say, breathless.

"That´s my job, baby, that´s my job," she says. We head back to Kelly, who is in Jamie´s office, a converted patio, sunny and gleaming. Kelly is standing over an odd-looking cooler sitting on the floor. "Okay, this," Jamie says, pointing to it, "this is why you have to know me! This is how I know people know and care about me. My girlfriends got me an in-car refrigerator that you plug in. I´m serious. An in-car refrigerator so I can eat lunch in my car in the carpool lane. Because I´m obsessive. I´m the first person in the school line every day. I´m compulsively early.

"I´m also hyper-ly aware of time. So, like, given that we have an hour and a half to get to know each other...."

She steers me into the dining room, where lunch is waiting, a gorgeous spread of poached salmon, rice pilaf, fresh greens, and strawberries. I don´t get a chance to say much. Jamie Lee Curtis is an entertainer, first and foremost, seemingly determined to show me a good time, and she has a lot on her mind: motherhood, work, fitness, alcoholism, drug addiction, women who work, women too busy for their own kids -- a woman she used to be.

Her Drug Addiction and Alcoholism"I look back on A Fish Called Wanda," she says, scooping up some salmon. "An unbelievably funny movie, great movie, without question one of my biggest successes. I actually made money from that film. I mean, all of the things that you hope for and want. People say, ´Oh, this must´ve been the greatest time of your life.´ And all I remember is crying in the car to and from the set, an hour´s drive from London. What I remember about that movie was that my daughter was a baby, 6 months old. There were often days I´d come home and she was asleep already. And I thought what the frick am I doing? My memory of that is horrible. Not that I wasn´t grateful for the gig. Not that I wasn´t grateful to John Cleese and thank him continually to this day -- I send him funny fish presents to say, ´I remember what you gave me. Thank you.´ But it doesn´t take away from what I knew -- knew -- at that point what I was doing. And yet I couldn´t stop myself. And I didn´t have a guide. I didn´t have a mother saying to me, ´Sweetheart, after this movie, take a year off at least to bond with this baby.´"

No, her own mother led that same frenzied life -- movie after movie, a work ethic of the highest order -- and Curtis thinks of herself as the less-than-perfect product of it. She was determined, somewhere in the back of her mind, to be a more-present mom for her own kids. She tells me that, at least in the beginning, she failed at that.

"My daughter was not the priority. I would take jobs wherever I had to take them and I would work all the time. You can talk about working for the greater good of the family and all of the spin you want to put on it, and yet I was just following my mother at the expense of my daughter.

"So one day, it was almost as if Annie put her hand up and went, ´Stop in the name of love before you break my heart. Think it o-over.´ You know. She was about 8 and she really said, ´Look at yourself.´

"She said, ´Don´t think you´re being a good mother just because I look good and I´m a good girl and a good student. Look at the way you´re living your life.´

"The only thing children need is their mother. They don´t need stuff. They don´t need the accoutrements. They need the consistency of their mother. The hard, boring, repetitive, day-in, day-out teachings. I missed all that. I would come in, make a big splash, it all looks good, and then I´m gone. It was like, ´Was she here?´ and I wasn´t there for the hard stuff just like my mother wasn´t there."

Annie´s declaration 12 years ago caused Curtis to reevaluate her priorities and become more of the mom she always wished she had. She cut back on work and opened her arms to a newborn son, Tom. She tells me that it wasn´t until several years later, however, that she faced her worst demons: alcoholism and drug addiction.

"I sought refuge from what was difficult in life in alcohol and painkillers," she says. "No one knew it. It was that kind of silent escape valve. I kept thinking that I deserved it because I was working so hard and now I had these two kids and I was really trying to be a much better mother and dat dat dat dat dat dat dat dat, trying to keep all the balls in the air, and yet I was still addicted to drugs and alcohol."

Getting Sober, Gaining Weight
She hit bottom when she began imagining dying this way, leaving her children without a mom. She sought help and found it, conquering her addictions eight years ago. She relates nearly all of the profound changes in her life to her sobriety.

"All of a sudden I realized I exist," she says. "The idea of having your own mind. A mind of one´s own, that it isn´t your mother´s mind, that you´re not just aping the family value, or the husband´s value. I have a mind of my own. And it has taken me a long time to figure that out. And of course I´ve done it very publicly. So what happens is you then become the person who ends up developing like the Polaroid in front of millions of people over the course of a career."

She thinks it´s ironic that she is so well-known for a 2002 photo spread depicting her less-than-toned self.

"It was misunderstood and continues to be misunderstood a little bit. At the time I might have been two years sober. I put on 20 pounds when I got sober because of all the sugar that you don´t get in alcohol I needed in cereal or crackers or something. And at that time I had a young child and I didn´t have the free time to dedicate to a kind of more physical life.

"So I think what some people took from those photos was: Love yourself, no matter what. And the problem with that is: What if what you´re doing is unhealthy? Are you to accept what you look like kind of in a militant way, like, this is what I look like -- stop it! If you´re 50 pounds overweight and you have diabetes in your family, was I telling you that´s okay? No. But unfortunately what got distilled from this moment was every person who comes up says, ´Thanks a lot for keeping it real.´ A lot of people misunderstood me -- that being overweight was okay because that´s who you are.

"And the problem is that how many of us are killing ourselves every day? Who here has high blood pressure and is still eating salt and french fries? Who has been told that her liver is enlarged and unless she stops drinking she´s gonna end up with liver disease and/or need a liver transplant and/or die? We create senseless acts of violence against ourselves daily. And we live in this amnesia that we´re not.

"If I was a doctor today sitting with a woman who says, ´Oh, yes, I smoke.´ You do?! Really? Then I don´t want you as a patient. It´s my job to take care of people. But I want to take care of somebody who wants to live."

Eat Less, Move More
"She´s on a tear about this, excited and full-on preaching. She could make a mint as a motivational speaker. "You know, I say to alcoholic families all the time," she says, "if you want to avoid your 14-year-old child drinking, make sure that you don´t drink in front of your 14-year-old child. If your children see that you can celebrate something without alcohol, or mourn the loss of something without alcohol, they will not know that the first thing you do when something good happens to you is pop a bottle of Champagne and/or the first thing you do when someone dies is get a drink. Just don´t drink in front of your kids. Right away that can have an effect."

I ask her how she changed her body into the svelte version sitting before me today. "Just by making healthy choices," she says. "You know, in Freaky Friday, the only line I ad-libbed in the whole movie was, ´Make good choices,´ when the mommy is dropping the daughter off at school. And I wasn´t making good choices.

"Here´s the book title. I´ll bust it out now and never have to write the book. Ready? Eat Less, Move More. Period. Half the book is the eat-less part, half the book is the move-more. Period. Eat less, move more. Period. That´s it. We´re sedentary. We don´t walk enough. We don´t drink enough water. We get sedentary, we eat salt all day long. We go to the doctor, we get a blood test. We get a heart test. We get diagnostic tools that medicine has now to tell us how we are, and what do we do? We don´t do anything. Or we take a drug. And that´s not what I´m talking about. Take a drug so you don´t have to change. No! I´m saying change. Change it right now.

"So, for me, I´ve done it under the radar, and I don´t want attention for it. I look for no external validation anymore. This is about how I feel. It´s about being healthy. I swear to God my cholesterol was, like, 220 or 230 or something. I´m now probably like 160. And I started winning on the tennis court."

Her Body Image
She looks at the clock, tells me she knows instinctively -- always -- what time it is. The photo shoot is to start in a half hour, so we´d better get going. She wants to sign books for my daughters. She stands up, says we have to hurry. She and Kelly lead me into the basement. "This," she says, "is the inner sanctum." "Yeah, you´re not going to believe this -- " Kelly says, eyes wide. The basement is a fortress of organization. Trunks lined up with typewritten labels: Annie´s dolls, Tom´s sweaters, Chris´s shoes. Archives of books, films.

"You ask why God invented me," Curtis says. "Why God invented me was simply to organize. Everything is cataloged, and this is my husband´s archive, our archive, everything. And it´s constant. Systems excite me. If I get an idea for a new system it´s like -- "

"Look at her!" Kelly says. "She´s excited just thinking about it! She´s getting verklempt!"

"I am!" She hands me some books, grabs a Sharpie. We head to the car. She pulls another book out of her bag. "This is my trip to Mexico," she says. "I´m so compulsive that within an hour of being home, the 500 digital pictures are downloaded and then by 6 the next morning I´ve created the iBook." She flips through a masterfully produced hardbound book of a trip taken just two weeks earlier.

"I have more energy than anybody," she says. "That is true. I mean my real genetic gift was, you know, the Energizer Bunny kind of stuff. By the way, I´m like a child. I have all the energy in the world, and then I drop like a light switch. Okay, let´s go. We´ll take a right out of the driveway."

We talk in the car, while she navigates. "You know, the one thing I wanted to address about eating is: There is obviously this obsession in this country with people´s bodies and I perpetuated that. I feel badly that my early career was so focused on what I looked like and my body. I do regret the message I sent."

"You feel that you contributed in some way to women´s need for a perfect body?" I ask.

"Of course I did," she says. "Of course I did. But again I was contributing to it in a genetic form, meaning that it was the currency of my family. The currency of my family was what you looked like. My father was arguably one of the most handsome men, my mother the most beautiful. My mother was known for her incredible figure. My beautiful mommy with her enormous breasts and tiny waist. And my father with his beautiful physique and blue eyes. Elvis copied his hair, you know. So your looks were your currency. And they became my currency, even though for me it was trickier because I obviously was not classically pretty the way my parents were."

Adoption, Family Life, and Priorities
We talk about her son. "My son has learning differences and therefore he has a most unique and fascinating mind, and it has been a challenge to find how he learns best. And we are in a great environment for that to happen. He has a great team around him and we are working very hard to help him, as we work very hard to help both our kids." "Do you think adoption is an issue for your kids?" I ask. "I think adoption is an issue for everybody at all stages," she says. "There´s tremendous loss and great love and great warmth."

We talk about Madonna and Angelina Jolie and the way international adoption has been portrayed, lately, by the media as a kind of fad.

"It´s just hateful," she says. "Just hateful. It´s just a hateful thing to say. It´s obscene to question motive. These are human beings helping other human beings. Period. End of story."

We arrive at the photo shoot five minutes early. "See?" she says, "right on time." We´re greeted by some people she knows and others she´s just met, and all say some version of the same two things: "Wow! You look fabulous!" And, "You´re so skinny!" She shoots me a glance, comes up to me and whispers: "Do you hear it? That´s what I get. All the time." She seems vaguely disgusted by the comment, but also vaguely grateful, a confusing mix of emotions. "I had a friend of my mother´s come up to me this Christmas," she says. "She´s a dear woman, she has a heart of gold. She came up to me and whispered in my ear: ´You look like you again.´" It was not, to her mind, a compliment. "I didn´t know what to say. Because the problem is that´s what I traded my life on. That´s what I get everywhere I go. Everywhere I go. Am I nothing but a body? Am I nothing but someone who talks about her frickin´ body?" "No," I tell her, "of course not."

She opens her arms for a hug, says "thank you," and then she´s gone.

A few days later she calls me at home. It´s a Sunday morning and she just has a few things on her mind. World peace. And the idea that it should be a requirement, in a time of war, that everybody do community service. She talks about World War II and how it must have felt back then to be in a war that the whole country sacrificed for. "It doesn´t feel that way now. It feels like a few in the collective are shouldering the burden, both as families of people overseas and the brave men and women who are actually fighting and dying for our country." She talks about love, what it feels like to know that you´re loved. "Seen and Heard. There´s another book I could write. Seen and Heard. There it is. You know? You are your own human being, you have your own mind, your own fears. You have a feeling, and you´re allowed to have it." She talks about being an old lady some day. "My goal as an old lady is to be a grandma. I imagine myself photographing a lot more. I can imagine myself traveling the world, photographing. I can see myself living in solitude. I have found that I am a very quiet person, who needs and cherishes quiet. Peace. Quiet. And I never could own that before. Because I was always running. I was always a people person. But I´m not. I´m really quiet.

"If I´m alone I read. I could do nothing but read for the rest of my life.

"And this," she says, finally, "is where I have to get off the phone to make breakfast for my family. Good-bye. Thank you. Make good choices."

Jamie Lee Curtis Turns 50

And she´s an exuberant crusader for aging wisely and well

On a chilly afternoon in a rustic canyon in Los Angeles, Jamie Lee Curtis´s house buzzes with activity. As she makes a pot of tea in the kitchen, 12-year-old son Tommy whizzes by. Upstairs, electric-guitar sounds throb as husband Christopher Guest, the "mockumentary" film director (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind), helps daughter Annie, 21, sing and record a song as a gift for her mother.

"It´s a surprise," says Curtis, carrying the tea tray into the living room. "I´m going to have to pretend I haven´t heard it." In black slacks, sweater, and high-heeled boots, and wearing a wedding band of tiny diamonds, Curtis is a picture of understated elegance. In Hollywood, where middle-aged actresses are expected to resort to extreme measures to look younger, her short, naturally silver hair is subversive. By local standards Jamie Lee is letting her freak flag fly. The straight-talking actress and author is embracing her upcoming 50th birthday (November 22) with characteristic zest. "I have not one second of anxiety about turning 50," she says.

Radiantly healthy and easy in her own skin, Curtis is gifted with a trenchant wit and self-awareness, which she deploys when sharing her own life struggles. The daughter of movie stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, she was born a Hollywood princess. Fame came at 20, when she starred in a spate of horror movies, including Halloween. Later she came to be known as "the body," displaying her voluptuous figure in such fare as Perfect. Eventually her skill with a well-timed wisecrack became her claim to fame in comedies such as Trading Places. In her biggest success, True Lies, she played a mousy wife who transforms into a sexy action heroine.

In her early 40s, addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol, Curtis entered a sobriety program. Self-searching led to transformation, as she deepened her commitment to what meant most to her. She scaled down her acting career to raise her kids. "Jamie always wanted a regular, serene home life," says her friend the author Lisa Birnbach. "I remember visiting her when Annie was little, and they were making heart-shaped pancakes with Annie´s initial in jam, and I thought, ´I don´t do this for my kids.´ She sets a very high bar for herself as a mother, a wife, and a friend, and she´s totally sincere about it."

In 1993 Curtis began to publish children´s books, including Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day (HarperCollins Children´s Books, 1998), a New York Times bestseller.

While Curtis costars with a dog this fall in a comedy called Beverly Hills Chihuahua, she is limiting her acting to roles that don´t require long hours. She has a new gig as a spokesperson for Dannon Activia yogurt, she volunteers at her son´s school and for several children´s charities, and this September she will publish her eighth book – Big Words for Little People.

An accomplished photographer, Curtis collaborated conceptually with the photos on these pages, asking that they represent her quest to "shed skin," to jettison what no longer serves her. She says she aspires to "essential being. Nothing extraneous."

A few days after the photo shoot, Curtis e-mails an eerie photo she took of a pet reptile´s discarded skin. "It happened today," she writes. Oh, and another thing – remember those black boots she was wearing on the day of the interview? "I´m giving them away," she reports. "No more high heels. Too uncomfortable. Don´t need ´em. Gone."

Jamie Lee Curtis – growing older, becoming new again. "I want to be older. I actually think there´s an incredible amount of self-knowledge that comes with getting older. I feel way better now than I did when I was 20. I´m stronger, I´m smarter in every way, I´m so much less crazy than I was then.

"Years ago my husband and I were at the Golden Globes. I was wearing some borrowed dress that wasn´t me, my hair was done in a way that I never wear my hair, and I had earrings on. And my husband said, ´You know who is the most beautiful woman in the room?´ And I was hoping he was going to say me. And he pointed across the room at Jessica Tandy. She was sitting at a table wearing a cream-colored silk-shantung pantsuit. Single strand of pearls, short white hair, a little lipstick – nothing else. And I thought, ´He´s totally right.´ There was none of the pretense, none of the trying so hard.

"My style is a distillation. I´ve etched out who I am through myriad haircut attempts, outfit attempts, beauty attempts, diet attempts. It´s been an evolution. I´ve let my hair go gray. I wear only black and white. Every year I buy three or four black dresses that I just keep in rotation. I own one pair of blue jeans. I´ve given away all my jewelry, because I don´t wear it.

"The same way that midcentury modern architecture was in the ´50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines. "If I can challenge old ideas about aging, I will feel more and more invigorated. I want to represent this new way. I want to be a new version of the 70-year-old woman. Vital, strong, very physical, very agile. I think that the older I get, the more yoga I´m going to do.

"I saw a picture of me in a tabloid, where they had actually given my weight. I was like, ´How dare you – I´m not 161 pounds!´ I was indignant. I got home and I went on a scale and I was 161 pounds. There´s a lot of Lycra in clothing, so I didn´t notice the weight gain. I was in denial about it. This was two years ago. "Then I went to the doctor. And my blood pressure had risen a lot, and my cholesterol was crazy. I had gotten lethargic. But I wanted to play tennis again. So I started a really healthy way of eating, just avoiding things that I had been shoving in my mouth. Over the course of a year, I dropped about 20 pounds.

"Now, I get up at five o´clock in the morning every day, filled with energy. I play tennis three times a week, and I do yoga. I´m never going to be an athlete, never going to be running triathlons – I´m not that person. But I walk with girlfriends, and walking is incredibly good for you.

"That was a moment of truth and a big shift, taking care of my physiological life.

"My biggest concern is that I will calcify as I get older. I am a creature of habit: I wear the same clothes; I eat the same food; I am very regular in all of my activities. I can get lulled into complacency. Decalcification means constant evolution, where I´m constantly trying to shed skins and shed ideas.

"I look at my relationships all the time. If a relationship is really negative on an ongoing basis, what am I doing in it? What am I protecting? Am I protecting someone from the hurt and sting of losing me? Because that´s not healthy. It´s not good.

"The one benefit of being around fame my whole life is I´ve seen the façade of it. I know what people look like before they get all duded up. I see these people duded up and they´re talking differently, as if they´re titled aristocracy. They´re a girl from New Jersey, and it´s just hilarious. What are you doing in the gown, with the fake English accent?

"I´ve been an inconsistent parent at times, and it´s my greatest regret. When my daughter was small, I worked too much. I was replicating what my own mother did. A woman I admire tremendously named Dr. Susan Williams has a great phrase. She says, ´Children are paparazzi. They take your picture when you don´t want them to, and then they show it to you.´ My daughter showed me pictures, aspects of myself that I didn´t like. It was Annie who went, ´Hello, this isn´t working.´ And I made adjustments, and then she did it again, and I made more adjustments. An unflattering picture of you is incredibly helpful.

"My mother was just freaking beautiful. That was her burden, to keep that going. She had two kids, and then naturally life took over, and there was a lot of alcohol, and other things took their toll. [Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis divorced in 1962; she married stockbroker Robert Brandt later that year.] I respect that she survived all that, with no real help. She had a couple of good friends, but this was a generation of women that didn´t trust a lot of other people. I feel badly for her that she didn´t have any of the support I have. At the end of her life she was miserable, miserable. But coming where she came from and achieving what she achieved was a huge accomplishment.

"My daughter is in college. Annie is a beautiful dancer and choreographer; her real talent, I think, is her ability to create a feeling from movement. She´s a talented girl and really bright.

"My son has some learning issues, and we´re in a [specialized] environment educationally. So that´s a whole new learning curve for all of us. And it´s been fascinating. I work hard with his school, helping and learning and fighting on behalf of these kids.

"When my kids leave I would like to go back to school. To me, a great boomer fantasy would be creating courses of study, like book clubs, where people come together in small groups, for lectures, reading, movies, music, art, and then travel to that place. We would do Italy, we would do the Netherlands, we would do Russia. We would study Nazi Germany, then watch Schindler´s List and The Diary of Anne Frank, then see my girlfriend Deborah Oppenheimer´s documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers, and hear about stories of the Kindertransport, then read four or five historical fiction books and then travel there.

"As we get older, we say goodbye to a lot of people. We say goodbye to our friends, to our family, and discover our capacity to love and communicate and have intimacy – real intimacy, not the superficial intimacy we had in our youth. Strip away the bulls---; be done with that. Ask yourself these two questions: Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well? "Service is another way to get out of the calcification of your life. I am the spokesperson for two children´s charities – the Children Affected by AIDS Foundation and Starlight Starbright, which does wish-granting for ill children. I host a lot of charity events. There´s a lot of personal satisfaction in being of service to other people. It´s the complete opposite of being for sale.

"If I get the chance, I would like to evolve as a public voice, to find a way to talk about making better choices. It is very difficult to talk about people´s personal choices, and the addiction to having what we want when we want it. For instance, diabetes is an Armageddon. Where did this come from? It came from us. We need to live the example more. Giving up something that makes us feel good in order to keep us alive as a species. We need a surgeon general who challenges the way people eat. I don´t know why doctors don´t say, ´Oh, you smoke? I´m not going to treat you. It´s clear that you´re not interested in being alive.´

"I´m going to give myself a breakfast birthday party. I´ll serve my favorite meal of the day: cereal and waffles and bacon and pancakes and scrambled-egg-white omelets and protein shakes and cappuccinos. My friends will come with their kids. The little children can get their hands dipped in wax, and they can watch the wonderfully talented candy carver swirl the liquid candy into dragons, and they can leave with a dragon lollipop.

"To celebrate, I´m making a book of 50 of my photographs and giving it to each of my friends. It´s not for public consumption. People have been very complimentary over the years, and many have said, ´Oh, you should have a show.´ I thought about it, and I thought, no. I don´t need more attention. I don´t ever want to make taking pictures into another way of saying ´Here I am.´ Because I´m as here as I want to be."

Peeling away the layers

"Getting older means paring yourself down to an essential version of yourself," says Curtis. Not only has the author and actress distilled her own style down to a simple, black-and-white wardrobe; she has restricted her own activities to those that mean the most to her: raising her children with her husband of 23 years, Christopher Guest; volunteering at her son´s school; writing children´s books; and helping raise funds and awareness for children´s charities. She does enjoy acting but no longer allows it to interfere with her personal life, declining film work that requires long hours or extensive travel without her family. Says Curtis: "If you told me I was doing a movie and I had to shoot tomorrow night, all night, I´d go, ´No, I go to bed at 8:30. I get up at 5:00. No, I can´t, so sorry.´ "

Midcentury modernista?

Curtis would like to invent a new way to grow older. As she nears her own half-century birthday, she hopes to steal a page from the modern design movement of the mid-20th century and become, as she says, "New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines."

Just an old-fashioned girl?

As a teenager, Jamie Lee Curtis was flat-chested and gawky. Then she grew up to be a sex symbol – but one with a brain and a happy marriage. Lesley Salisbury met the feisty star. Main photograph by Greg Gorman

Look at her. Just look at her. And this is a woman who says her best features are her eyes. Closely followed by her toes. Which will soon, if you believe her, meet her more visible assets as they obey the law of gravity. "My breasts are dropping, I´ve got cellulite in my butt and hips, I have short mousey hair and skin that breaks out. I´m like any other normal working mother just trying to keep it all together, " says Jamie Lee Curtis.

This is the Hollywood princess who never felt comfortable with the way she looked. The gawky, ugly duckling who wanted to swan around like all the other curly-haired, cute celebrity kids. She was the flat-chested schoolgirl who dreamed about fame, the teenage starlet desperate to be a big star.

And then she grew up. And out. Her spectacular statistics were highlighted in films like Trading Places, in which she was nude for seven seconds (she´s counted) and freeze-framed on video for even longer; as a figure-happy fitness instructor in Perfect and in A fish called Wanda, which had her showing her body and her vocabulary (there´s no one in Hollywood with a more colourful one) beside John Cleese and Kevin Kline.

Suddenly the ugly duckling ("Goofy", she called herself) was a sex object. And she loved it. She was that rare creature, a sex symbol with a brain and a sense of humour. She thought it was hilarious that men couldn´t look her in the eye any more (their sights were pinned lower).

"People think I blow these up or stick ´em on with Velcro", she said. But it was hard work being a body beautiful.

"I started getting into the whole obsessive body-perfect trip", she says now. "Up until Perfect I was reasonably sane about my work outs. And I did my share of drinking and illegal substances.

Then suddenly I was in the gym for five hours a day, every day. I hung upside down by hooked boots, I did hundreds of squats and sit-ups and hip thrusts. I lifted weights, I did two 90-minute aerobics classes a day, I went home and swam 50 laps. I gave up smoking and drinking and drugs. I´d eat only fish, fruit, vegetables and salad and never after 7pm. I was in bed by eight. And I was no ****ing fun...

I felt you could be loved only if you had the tightest inner thigh. I was totally obsessed by my body. I was outraged if I saw an ounce of fat. I became obsessed with my jeans fitting to skin thight perfection. Luckily, I came to my senses."

Ask her how she did it and she´ll tell you tenderly that her husband, British actor-writer Christopher Guest, and their adopted four-year-old daughter Annie were the reasons.

"We´re like Mutt and Jeff – total opposites," she says of Christopher, whose father is Lord Haden-Guest. "But we have a good marriage – not perfect, but good – and for the first time in my life I´m happy to be me. And happy to be normal, as far as someone as goofy as me can be."

"I never felt comfortable with how I looked. I still don´t I never had much of a self-image. I was never known as me, I was always Janet Leigh´s and Tony Curtis´s daughter, Queen of the Ghouls in horror movies, and The Body. Now, you know what? I´m happy to be 33, enjoying my daughter, my marriage and my career."

She has a new film, My Girl, out this month, co-starring the cute Home Alone child star Macaulay Culkin (so cute he had a swear box installed on the set and made out like a bandit every time Jamie Lee opened her mouth). She´s also very proud that her US TV series, Anything but love, is doing well, and prouder still to be directing some episodes.

"I hoped this was how my life would turn out but I never really expected it – and I took a few wrong turns on the way," she admits.

Funny, feisty and strong, she´s no one´s sex toy these days (except, perhaps, Christopher´s: walk into her bedroom in her spanish style house on the edge of Beverly Hills, past a pile of Annie´s toys, and you´ll see a pair of handcuffs by the bed. "Just for the pictures," says Jamie with a naughty gleam in her eyes). She´s a fascinating contradiction: she looks like a sex symbol, walks like a tomboy, talks a blue streak like a sea captain´s parrot, turns somersaults to amuse Annie, eats fish and chips with a passion and thinks her perfect body is, to paraphrase, a load of codswallop.

She zips around in a new Mercedes convertible with her motto – "Life Should Be A Dream, sha-boom, sha-boom" – on the licence plate and, for Jamie Lee Curtis, for now, it is.

"I´m not an exhibitionist," she says, despite the blonde-in-fishnet picture session that had her giggling and flirting ("innocent flirting helps keep a women content in a relationship," she says. "Flirt a lot. Your sexuality is like a volcano – you should let the stream out sometimes") and sent her home to Christopher with a smile.

But she still enjoys being a sex symbol from time to time. And while there still is time. "It´s fun while it lasts," she says. "The important thing is that I´m secure enough now to realise that it doesn´t last. After 30, everything starts going south. I used to say that one day I´d wake up not caring whether or not I had the best, cutest little ass in Hollywood, and I´d order a great big piece of chocolate cake and let somebody else take over having the cute body. Well, I´ve been eating that cake for some time now." And – since someone´s got to say it – she´s having it too...

Jamie Lee Curtis now Lady Haden-Guest

Introduces us to her two children at her L.A. home and talks about adoption and the aristocracy

You can call her Jamie Lee Curtis, or, quite properly, Lady Haden-Guest, courtesy of her marriage to British actor Christopher Guest, who last year became the Fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling, Essex. And if celebrity is indeed a close cousin of aristocracy, Jamie Lee, daughter of not one but two Hollywood legends – Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh – is almost to the manner born.

The 38-year-old star of A fish called Wanda and True Lies views her new status in British society with nothing short of complete respect. She takes it all quite seriously. Tradionally, Jamie Lee has been refreshingly free of airs and graces, and that has not changed now that she has a title. She answers her own front door and, in a close-fitting black sweater and pants, looks quite simply stunning.

She, her actor/writer/director husband of 13 years and their children, Annie, 11 and Thomas, not yet two, commute between Los Angeles, their work base, and Idaho, their getaway. If Lord Guest is desperately, passionately, perhaps mildly fanatically private, Jamie is only marginally less so – especially when it comes to protecting their children. But for herself, she knows some attention is essential and she is affable, relaxed and accommodation when HELLO! visits her wood-beam ceilinged, Spanish-style LA home, where crisp Pacific Ocean breezes waft through lots of open windows. Strains of Van Morrison drift through the house, as do four dogs and a friendly grey cat.

Jamie Lee is torn, really. The private side, which has no inclination to indulge in any public soul-baring about why they adopted, butts up against her desire to help bring adoption out of the shadows.

That desire is what prompted her to write her whimsically illustrated children´s book, Tell me again about the night I was born. Just published in Britain by Scholastic (£9,99), it is her second book but her first to be released in Britain. Its predecessor, When I was little &ndah; A Four Year Old´s Memoir Of Her Youth, will be out next year. Today I Feel Silly and Where do Ballons Go? are in works. And Virus, a sci-fi thriller, is soon to be published.

A true Hollywood veteran, Jamie justifiably considers herself used to dealing with the media.Yet she is positively itching to address what she considers a blunder she made last year when her father-in-law died just three weeks after Thomas was born.

"My family was in shock, we were in deep mourning and I had a new baby to look after," she explains. Only because she was obligated did she speak to reporters about a film, but she did so with a heavy heart. And one overly zealous reporter, hell-bent on getting her reaction to becoming Baroness Haden-Guest, really got to her. In frustration, Jamie retorted that the title would get her a good table at Claridge´s. She instandy regretted the flip remark, which has since been reprinted ad infinitum, and is anxious to correct her record.

Jamie, how do we address you now?

"Nobody addresses me as Lady Guest anywhere except perhaps in the House of Lords. It´s what they do there – and it´s probably the only place in the world where anyone will address me in that manner even if I say to them, " Oh no no no, just call me Jamie."

Why does your little remark about getting a table at Claridge´s bother you so much?

"It shows no respect for the institution to which my husband recently swore an oath. He proclaimed his allegiance to an institution that I have tremendous respect for, and if I read that comment, I´d say, Who the bleep does she think she is!"

"And it´s not like me. I´m a serious person. I´m not a flippant person who makes some cheap comment to get a laugh. It was literally made on the heels of my father-in-law´s death and it really bothers me now."

How do you feel about the House of Lords perhaps disappearing?

"It seems to me that Tony Blair was elected with the agenda of clearly reforming the way it operates, whether that means abolishing the voting rights of hereditary peers or abolishing the House of Lords. I´m not sure what he intends or what the Queen intends, so until we have a clear idea it would be stupid of me to comment.

"I can just tell you, from being a noephyte member of a time-honoured tradition, that I certainly would support Chris´ view that reform is always good. It´s this thing and I am there to support him and help him. That was my only agenda when I went to the House of Lords to see him take his oath. I tried very hard to make sure that his day there was his time."

Was the ceremony impressive?

"It was a very quick oath-taking ceremony, which I almost missed simply because I happened to be so in awe of being in this beautiful room! I fully assumed that the event would be announced and I was trying to find my seat along the wall in the upper tier at the time. I happened to look right and there was Chris standing at the podium, his hand was in the air, and then it was over! It took maybe ten or 15 seconds, then he was able to take this seat on the cross-benchers and we watched a little bit of a debade.

"I was with Annie and Chris´ mother and I was very aware that it must have been very difficult day for his mother – and yet also a wonderful day in that her son was taking his seat. Then I was thinking about my daughter and what it meant for her to be there with her daddy. And then there were my own feelings of How did I get here? And, because I´m a very puplic figure, I was trying not to draw any attention to the fact that I was there. So I kind of shrunk. It was a complicated day, but it went off beautifully."

Was writing children´s books a long-held fantasy of yours?

"No. I don´t fantasise. I´m not a dreamer, really. I´m much more of a realist. Always have been, since I was little.

Why write about adoption, since you consider it such a personal and private issue?

"It really was born out of many people´s misunderstanding of my daughter´s life and how we became a family. I respecht Annie´s privacy and felt odd writing a book about adoption which was obviously based on the experience of our family, but at the same time keeping our family history very private. It was a complicated balanced act.

"It´s a book which is really written to open people´s eyes and ears and hearts and minds to something that most people still talk about in hushed voices. The story has never been told in a humourous and celeratory way before. I´m tremendously proud of my books – they´re the closest things to who I am as a human being. It is my sensibility. It is how I look at the world.

Why do you hate the word "adopted" preceding "daugther"?

"I think it´s a label, a way of separating a child from its family, a way of somehow taking something away from being like any other family."

Doesn´t it signify special people who´ve extended themselves to offer a child a home?

"No. I don´t look at us as being special people, I look at us as being parents who, for whatever reason, have chosen to adopt. I look at all parents as special. I respect all people who decide their lives to their children. I just don´t think that adopting a child is any more heroic than giving birth to a child.

"If anyone is heroic, I believe it´s the young mother who chooses to go through childbirth and who respects that human life and understands that it would be impossible to care for the child. Carrying it to term, then placing that child in someone else´s arms and saying, I trust you with the life of my child – that, to me, is a hero and someone who is special."

Do you see adopted children as somehow chosen?

"I have very specific feelings about the term chosen one. I know that people like it, or certainly they did in the past. It was a safe haven for talking aabout adoption because nobody wants to use the term a child who was given away. That´s the truth, though. The truth is that another mother chose to give a child to you to raise because she could not care for it.

"I don´t believe it´s my right to say, I chose you, honey, therefore you´re special. I think it´s too complicated a relationship. Also, I think it´s wrong to assume that adoption is without heartache.

"I wrote my book so that another child won´t drive in a car with an adoptive child and mother and say – as I´ve had happen to me – She´s not your real mom, is she? Which, no matter how innocent the question, is hurtful.

"I´m not an adoption activist, I´m an advocate. And I´m using a personal experience hopefully to help open that up. Period. I´m not on the hill lobbying for legislation, although I could imagine that when my children are grown up I will become very public spokesperson for removing even more of the discriminations. I don´t choose to do that now."

Despite your celebrity status, you favour adoptions being conducted openly, rather than behind closed doors?

"The people giving up a child and those adopting one share a common human being, so to pretend that the birth mother doesn´t exist and is in some sort of closed file is, to me, just not enlightened. It was very important for me to be open. I truly believe in the goodness of people. My fame has never been something I have hidden from.

"There´s story after story of horrific adoptive experiences, yet, I was having a complicated, but very positive and fulfilling, experience with my husband and – because I didn´t have my son yet – my daughter. I believed there should be a celebration here and that´s why I wrote the book.

"I asked my daughter her permission and she thought it was a good thing. Both books are a story of her life, althought facts have been changed. And I hope that people in those books being about her makes her feel good, not bad."

How did Annie react to having a little brother?

"Probably the same as every other ten-year-old when a new baby is brought into the house. There is a mixture of excitement, bewilderment, jealousy, great love and connection. I think there´s a combination of all of that going on in my family.

"One of the thrilling aspects of adopting a child, as well as one of the most difficult, is that it often happens very quickly, as was the case with my son. In a way, the gestation process occurs after a child has been born and everyone in the family goes through a change, which is a difficult time. It´s difficult to have a new baby in the house. It´s to difficult when you didn´t know there was going to be a baby a week before."

Were there any other unforeseen problems?

"The only disappointment I´ll talk about publicly about not going through childbirth was missing the unbelievable love and affection you get from the world around you, and the delicacy with which people treat woman who are about to give birth. I have particpated in this lovefest with many, many women.

"But when you´re an adoptive mother, no one knows that you´re about to become a mother. No one understands that you´re going through the exact same fears about the health of the child, about your ability to be a parent, about the changes in your life and marriage, the changes with your other child, the financial restraints, the Do I have enough room in my house? sort of worries.

"Every pregnant woman has nine months to deal with those problems, while adoptive mothers often have no time. That´s small price to pay for the joy I´ve never talked about. For me, it was significant."

You were talking about breather from work when Tom came along...

"I´d decided that I´d take a significant amount of time off after Fierce Creatures. I´d saved some money and it seemed like Annie really could use time with me in a way that we hadn´t had. I also needed the time with her – she was developing so fast and I felt I was missing to lot. I didn´t like it and made a choice. Luckily I had the financial means. It was 18 months and, during that period, it was a case of then there were four!"

Would you do another TV series after Anything But Love?

"Today! Right now! I´m very happy that I´ve been able to participate in every area of acting that I´ve ever wanted to, in a fairly successful way. I´ve had very varied jobs and I´m not a snob – I don´t think that True Lies is necessarily betten than my Hertz commercials.

"Also, I think the horror movies I did were wonderful. I´m going to do another one to mark the 20th anniversary of my first film ever – it has to come out on October 31, 1998, 20 years to the day after Halloween appeared. Why not?"

Will it be as scary?

"If we play our cards right it will be pretty scary because, of course, there´s a revisit. The horror movie market is really strong again and I thought doing this sequel was a way to be respectful to the audience who gave me my career to begin with – and a career I´m very proud of. I had a really good time doing those films."

Do you entertain much at home?

"No. For somebody as loud as I am, I´m really quiet. I write children´s books and take pictures and raise two kids."quot;

Do you see much of your family?

"Yes. I saw my father this weekend and we had a great time with Tom. We see my mother weekly. She lives close, my dad lives close. One of my sisters lives here, my brother lives here with his baby, my sister Kelly lives in New York City, so I don´t see her as much. We have a normal, busy, scattered but close family."

Despite being enormously famous, you seem to manage to live so normally.

"I´m recognised a lot more thatn I ever ackhowledge. I don´t even see it. I´m reminded of it by people but I don´t see it. I also don´t draw a lot of attention to myself. I don´t attend a lot of premieres. I have been married for a long time, so I´m not out in public dating people. We travel privately. I don´t go to places where there are hordes of people waiting to take pictures. I choose to avoid that. I live a very private life.

"The day my husband took his seat in the House of Lords was a private day, obviously. A private moment. A lone guy on a motorcycle pulled up and said, My paper would really like a photograph of you, I promise I won´t jump you, would it be okay? I asked Chris and Annie and we said, Okay.

"That was the only press intrsion the entire week in London. My experiences have always been relatively calm and respectful and non-intrusive.

"Dodi Fayed was a very, very good friend of my father´s. His father is also a very good friend of my father´s and I knew Dodi socially with my dad. I woundn´t be able to handle that kind of intrusion in my personal life. I don´t know how I would deal with something like that. It´s just the worst."

Did Diana, Princess of Wales touch your life?

"What was inspiring for me was that she discovered her own mind. I didn´t follow her every move but I was aware of the discovery of her mind and the ability to say what she felt. She´s been called an icon for unhappy women and I understand the reference, but rather than that she represented someone who changed, who discovered that she had opinions. That is something I have taken from this horrible experience. It made me think twice before I shut my mouth. I am actually a lot less opinionated than people might think, and it really has given me some strength to pipe up a bit.

"I´ve thought about Diana often. I, like the rest of the world, have thought about her children. I wrote and extraordinary public display of affection for his big sister. It made me call my sisters and brothers and make that connection. In the simplest of terms, he stood up for his big sister. And it moved the world."

Jamie Lee Curtis on scream

Twenty years after she first starred in Halloween Jamie Lee Curtis is back

She has been famous since she was born. But when she sashayed that amazing figure through the scarier moments of Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis became an instant star.

Two decades on, as she prepares to star in a new version of Halloween alongside her mother, Janet Leigh, she´s a women who really has got it all.

First, there´s an impressive list of movies which took her from the horror genre of Prom Night and Terror Train, through sexpots with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places and John Cleese and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, to fast-paced comedy with Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies. She has a happy marriage that has lasted for 14 years, and two children she adores. She also has a new career as an author.

The Queen of Scream, as she was once dubbed, will be 40 on November 22. And she has decided that the screaming is going to stop – and her real life is going to take over.

"I really am at the end of my movie career," she says. "I´m 40 this year, and we´re talking about the big screen."

She knows what she´s talking about. As the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh she saw the fame game from her earliest days – and learnt to cope.

"I´m really proud of myself right now," she says. "I´m at a good place in my life. I´m an emotional wreck, to be perfectly honest, but I´ve created this very strong woman to get through my career, because you have to be strong to get through in showbusiness. I think I´m really brave as an actor – I don´t have any training but I have never shied away from trying something, even if I might literally fall flat on my face."

The woman whom Hollywood christened The Body is keeping her curves covered up when we meet at the famous Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. She´s wearing a simple, mauve twin set and black trousers and plonks herself down in one of the hotel´s large and very luxurious chairs. "quot;Look at this – a Scream Queen throne!" she giggles.

There´s no screaming in her life away from the cameras, however. She and her husband, the comedian, actor and director Christopher Guest, dote on their two adopted children – Annie, 11, and two-year-old Tom.

I think motherhood is a very profound experience," she says. "It´s very hard for women to articulate what it is that makes it so worthwhile, but I do know that is has completed me.

"It has enabled me to find real happiness and the ability to go out into the world and try anything, knowing that I´ll always have my family.

"I have amazing good fortune and I´m really happy.

"My daughter is an amazing person. Annie is 11 and she´s Buddhist, a vegan and a diehard debater.

"I have a wonderful opportunity now to get to know someone in a way that is different from the relationship I had with my folks. I think I was pretty complacent as a child, but now I havve a very challenging daughter. I think she´s going to be a remarkable woman, somebody who I am going to be really excited to know.

"And then I have a baby boy and it´s wild. It´s just an amazing, deep connection to a person that I´ve never felt with anybody before. I have never been in a better state of mind."

The fact that she now has that most English of status symbols – a title – is merely the icing on the cake. But nevertheless she is officially Lady Haden-Guest of Saling, ever since her 50-year-old husband inherited the peerage when his father, Lord Peter Haden-Guest, died in April 1996, aged 82. Jamie Lee and Annie were in the gallery when Christopher took his oath at the House of Lords last year.

"I take it seriously – I take everything in my life seriously," says the new Lady.

"When I´m in England, obviously that´s my title now. When I go to the House of Lords the guard says, Good evening, Lady Haden-Guest. I tried saying, Just call me Jamie, but it didn´t go over very well. He went, Yes, MLady. I guess I just have to eccept it and try to be gracious about it."

She breakes into a laugh that lights up her face as the incongruity of being an English aristocrat hits her.

"I am the daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish emigre family and a very poor Danish family from Stockton, California. Their daughter is now Lady Haden-Guest. It´s an astonishing bit of fate to arrive on my doorstep."

Tony Curtis (real name Bernard Schwartz) and Janet Leigh (Jeanette Helen Morrison) divorced, when Jamie Lee was four, and she was raised mainly by her mother. Both parents have been married four times and Curtis, 73, has been in a realtionship for the past five years with 28-year-old Jill Vander Berg. Jamie Lee approves. " They´re very much in love,", she says. "They make each other very happy."

She says her 72-year-old mother is still beautiful. The two drove together to a recent film festival in San Diego, California, to support a movie starring Jamie Lee´s sister Kelly, who is two years older. "It was fun to have that drive with my mom and spend that time alone with her," she says. But she has had other chances to be close to her mother – because, for only the second time in her career, they are acting alongside one another. The first time was in The Fog in 1980. This time it´s in H20 – which stands for Halloween 20 years on. The films opens here on Friday. It picks up the story of Laurie Strode, the babysitter who survived her brother Michael Myers´ murderous rampage in the original horror film.

The 1978 Halloween was made for a shoestring £180,000 – in 1998 Jamie Lee is paid ten times that amount to star in it again."It´s my way of writing a 20-year thank-you note to the fans, to the genre, who gave me everything I have in my life,´ she says.

Her mother, who starred in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho nearly 40 years ago, has a cameo role in H20.

"We knew that having my mother in the movie would be a great idea, but I resisted it because I didn´t think the part was right," Jamie Lee says. "I said, Make it worthwhile, make it clever and smart and funny and emotional and then, yeah, I´ll call her up.

"I knew that if they wrote the scenes correctly for my mother the fans would be thrilled to see the two icons of this genre, that it would be an unprecedented moment in film history." At one point, Janet has to tell her real-life daughter: "We all have bad things happen to us." After the showerscene in Psycho, she knows all about it.

"Just thinking about it makes me laugh," says Jamie Lee.

In H20, Laurie Strode has changed her name to Keri Tate, is divorced, a closet alcoholic and is headmistress of an exclusive Californian school, where her 17-year-old son, John (newcomer Josh Hartnett), is a student. When the entire student body boards tuses to go on a Halloween camping trip, John and three friends secretly remain behind. And that´s when the dreaded Micheal Myers suddenly shows up."I thought we had an opportunity to show what happens to somebody when this type of violence has been perpetrated on them," says Jamie Lee.

"Laurie Strode is supposed to be a survivor, but she´s not – she is a human train wreck because of what happened to her. It´s not just a make-a-lot-of-money horror movie, but a movie with integrity, depth and pathos. That was the only way I´d come back.

"Women have survived a lot of monsters, if you will, and I really do look at it as a metaphor for facing trauma, be it alcohol problems, drug problems, abusive relationships, unfaithful marriages, obesity or homosexuality. It sounds heavy-handed, I understand, and I have been criticised a couple of times by people saying, "Oh, please, it´s a horror movie, stop trying to make it poetry,. But you know what? This is the pitch I gave at every writers´ meeting."

The H20 cast-list includes Adam Arkin, Dr Aaron Shutt in Chicago Hope, rap star LL Cool J, Michelle Williams from Dawson´s Creek, Joseph Gordon-Levitt from Third Rock From The Sun, Adam Hann-Byrd and Jodi Lynn O´Keefe."It´s fun to work with young people because they´ll going to be famous and I´m going to be able to say, You know, I played his mother once, says Jamie Lee.

She has also been involved in a TV movie called Nicholas´ Gift, which has already been screened in the US. She plays Maggie Green, the mother of sever-year-old Nicholas Green, who was shot by bandits while riding in the back seat of a car during a family holiday in Italy in September, 1994.

Nicholas, from Accrington, Lancashire, was left brain-dead, and his parents created world headlines when, in the midst of their grief, they decided to donate his organs.

Since the movie was completed, 24-year-old Maria Bettino, who was given Nicholas´ liver, has given birth to a baby boy – whom she named after "this little angel who allowed me to live again", Veteran English actor Alan Bates plays Nicholas´s father, Reg. So will these two contrasting roles be Jamie Lee´s screen swansong? Despite what she says, it is difficult to imagine her settling down to domesticity. But her third children´s book, called Today I feel silly (And Other Moods That Made My Day) has just been published... and she couldn´t be more fulfilled.

"My books come directly from me – from my head, from my heart, my soul, the way I look at the world, my sense of humour," she says. "I think that maybe for the first time I am seen and heard as an artist in a way that I´ll never be seen and heard as an actor. "I have no idea why I landed on children´s books. But my parents divorced when I was four and I imagine it unsettled me, so I think I can appeal to four-year-olds as some sort of sister in the struggle."

But will Jamie Lee Curtis ever stop struggling? Will H20 convince her that it is time that the screaming stopped? Only time will tell.

Jamie Lee Curtis Embraces the F-Word (No, Not That One)

She´s fierce, she´s funny, and now she´s turning 50. The outspoken advocate for staying true to yourself salutes a milestone birthday as only she can.

Jamie Lee Curtis Turns 50

Jamie Lee Curtis sits in the dining room of a house in Malibu being primped and powdered for her MORE cover shoot. Her silvery gray hair, cropped close to the scalp, needs little attention, so her stylist, Sean, is entertaining everyone instead. He informs Curtis that he´s keeping a journal of his dreams.

"Am I in it?"
Sean nods yes.
"What was I wearing?"
"Not much," he replies.
They laugh.

Even in the days when Curtis was known as The Body – hers having been on display in 1983´s Trading Places and 1985´s Perfect – she would have found this humorous. Now that she has left her quest for perfection behind, she barely gives it a second thought. Rising from her chair, she heads for a bedroom filled with gowns (gold lamé, white organza, red satin) and stiletto-heel shoes. Emerging 10 minutes later, she is clad in an ice-blue silk number with a ruched bust and gold-grommeted Jimmy Choos on her feet. "I´m in a dress with heels that already hurt!" she yells, sauntering over to the light-filled living room where the photographer has set up.

The shoot lasts a couple of hours, and Curtis is a pro throughout. "This doesn´t feel like a sitting dress," she says at one point while perched awkwardly on a prop. She stands, and everyone sees that she is right. "I´m commando," she warns later. She even makes fun of her body, grabbing her breasts in one shot. MORE´s photo director, laughing, asks, "What´s the F-word for that?" referring to the day-in-the-life shoot the actress just completed for the magazine. "Fallen," Curtis replies, and grins. "Former," she adds, cracking up.

Accepting the reality of your body is verboten in Los Angeles, but Curtis is famous for it. In 2002, she posed for MORE in her skivvies and became a spokesperson for women tired of trying to live up to a Photoshopped ideal. Today Curtis admits that she got so caught up in not caring about body image at that time that she stopped thinking about fitness. "So I made a change and lost some weight," she says. "And for me, the fun thing is to lift a 20-pound weight in the gym and think, I was carrying that around?" She´s taken up Pilates and tennis. "I´m competitive now. You get me on a tennis court, I´m going to give you some game."

Curtis will be 50 on November 22, and she´s more than happy with the view from there. "Fifty is a big corner to turn," she says. "It used to mean being put out to pasture, but it´s the opposite with me. I feel more vibrant; I´m more active than I´ve ever been. The F-word really is freedom. It´s the freedom to have dropped the rock – the rock of addiction, of family, of comparisons with other people. It´s being fit and focused and kind of furious."

Hers is a philosophy that resonates for many women, but it is especially meaningful to actresses struggling with the indignities of Hollywood. "I don´t want to be 60 and getting a call from a third assistant director telling me I have night shooting," Curtis says. "I don´t want to worry about what I look like, whether I´ve got my big boobies pouring out of a gown.

"I have watched, my whole life, people age and become buffoons," she adds. "When you crest in your 30s or 40s and then you don´t pull out of the public eye, you become a caricature. You have to have grace, dignity, and gratitude, and walk away kind of slowly, like you´re walking away from a bear." She mimics someone doing that: "´I´m going to go now, bear. Don´t kill me, don´t rip my fucking face off.´"

Her Life in the Spotlight
The next day, I head to Curtis´s home, eager to hear more about her freedom. She lives in Santa Monica with her husband of 23 years, actor-filmmaker Christopher Guest (Best in Show, For Your Consideration), and their son, Tom, 12. Their daughter, Annie, 21, is away at college. The house is white and airy, with sky-high ceilings and art by renowned photographers on the walls, and Curtis proposes a tour. She leads me first to the basement, where she has clearly exercised the organizational skills that friends say she inherited from her mother, actress Janet Leigh. (Curtis´s pal Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, screenwriter of Bee Season, was at Leigh´s funeral, in 2004, and says, "I remember Jamie standing up and saying, ´Janet planned her funeral. Even the order in which things were supposed to happen.´")

In the basement, transparent boxes are piled high. There is luggage hanging from the ceiling and a gift-wrapping area with pink and blue ribbon dangling on hooks. Curtis opens an impeccably arranged file cabinet and says, "If you asked to see a picture of me from The Heidi Chronicles, I would be able to pull that up for you." And like a magician, she produces just that.

The rest of the tour is brief; one highlight involves bursting in on Guest, who is notoriously reserved. (The couple´s friend Richard Lewis, who starred with Curtis in the sitcom Anything but Love, says, "I once saw Christopher at a party, and his shadow was still in the car.") "Chris?" Curtis calls through the closed door. No answer. She enters; it turns out he is inside and we didn´t hear him. After a hello, the silence is excruciating. "So...this is Chris´s office...and he makes music down here...Bye, honey." Guest, with only a trace of a smile, replies, "Bye."

Soon we settle into Curtis´s office. Dressed in black and white – she has pared down her wardrobe to those colors alone – she leans back in a chair. I´m not sure where to begin; even though I´ve read through 25 years of her press clippings, I don´t yet have a good sense of her. There are the milestones, of course: born to Leigh and actor Tony Curtis and showcased as an infant on a Photoplay cover; her stint as Hollywood´s "scream queen," starting with 1978´s Halloween; her years as The Body; in 1988, her emergence with A Fish Called Wanda as an accomplished comedienne. But it´s not apparent how she went from a young woman playing the Hollywood game to a mature woman rewriting its rules.

Fortunately, Curtis jumps right in. "I´m the daughter of pretend people," she says. "My mother was Jeanette Morrison; my father was Bernard Schwartz. They kind of changed to become these stars."

Curtis says her parents´ divorce, when she was nearly 4, was "a catastrophe for me. But I had no way of communicating that. In my home, you did not say ´boo.´ It was a very old-school upbringing in that way." She felt insecure in those years, the daughter of stars valued for their appearance and who valued appearance themselves. "I was intimidated by anyone who had beauty and intellect," she says. Even as an adult, she has joked in speeches about the fact that her combined SAT scores were 840. She fishes them out of a drawer and shows them to me.

There was one bright spot, in eighth-grade U.S. history. "I was giving an oral report about Paul Revere´s ride," she recalls. "I went in the bathroom and put on green tights, a green leotard, and little antennae. I walked into the classroom, and everybody turned and looked at me. I went, ´Hi, I´m a flea. I was on the horse that Paul Revere rode.´ And I told the story from the point of view of the flea. The teacher gave me an A-plus, and that was the only time in my academic life where I found my way of doing it."

She was a movie star by the age of 20 but dismisses the achievement. "Becoming famous for doing nothing," she calls it. Her gaze is withering. "I was making horror movies, six of them in a row." Of the high points that followed, she says, "I´ve done movies I didn´t care about my entire life. The quality ones are an accident. That´s the luck of the freakin´ draw."

Curtis has a new film, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, coming out this fall, in which a pampered pooch gets lost in, yes, the mean streets of Mexico. But these days her children´s books are her main creative focus. Her eighth, Big Words for Little People, hits stores in September. "When I started writing books, I never thought, wow, this is going to be a great way to make a living," she says. "I merely found a voice and a way to express it, and I was thrilled. I could´ve paid them."

Curtis admits that her family would like to speed her transition to a more private life. "I married someone who detests show business," she says. "He just doesn´t think you need to play [the image game]." As Foner Gyllenhaal observes, "Chris has almost made a mantra of not caring what other people think. He´s taught Jamie to trust her own instincts."

She seems to. Curtis has worked diligently in recent years to free herself of superficial concerns – streamlining her wardrobe, weaning herself from high heels – but there has been a deeper transformation too. I ask her to explain how she got to where she is at 50. "Well, I´ve had the benefit of psychoanalysis," she says. But there seems to be more, and when I press a bit, she adds, "Sobriety. It´s the single most important thing I´ve ever done. When you gain sobriety in the middle of your life, you´re really reborn."

Getting Sober at 40
For years, off and on, "I had a problem with drugs and alcohol," she says. When she was 35, after complications from plastic surgery under her eyes, she started taking painkillers. "The feeling I got from [the pills] was, oh, wow, I feel better," she says. "So I rode that. No one knew. Chris didn´t have a clue."

By the time she was 40, she was ready to quit. At a New Year´s Eve dinner, her friends proposed they each write a list of things they hoped for themselves in the coming year. Sobriety topped Curtis´s list. She points to a framed two-by-four-inch piece of paper on her desk – she still has that New Year´s note.

She fiddles with the frame and confesses that she wishes she had evidence of her addiction. When she talks to someone who´s addicted, she asks, "Did you get booked [for DUI]? Get the picture. Go to the police department, thank them for arresting you, frame the picture, and put it up in your kitchen." As we talk, she pulls open the back of the frame and, inside, discovers a piece of paper. I become aware that something is happening. The paper turns out to be a letter to her sister Kelly, written while Curtis was still an addict. "The first line is, ´I´ve been harboring a secret, a bad secret for the length of your stay,´ " she begins. "´I have found and taken many of your Percocet and Vicodin.´" Kelly, she adds, had broken a bone and had been given painkillers. She continues with the letter. "´I´ve betrayed you, and I know that you´re angry, and you have every right to be.´ And then it goes on to say, ´I am lonely. I take them at night at home to ease the pain. I was so afraid to tell you.´" Curtis looks up. "I´ve said to Kelly, ´Can you find me that letter I wrote you?´ Wow. This has been on my desk for 10 years. Holy shit!" It is her evidence.

During her 40s, Curtis experienced the growth of a person previously stunted by addiction. "Moving forward and dropping loads, dropping the rock of materialism, of possession – it´s just been constant with me," she says. "Maybe, by the way, manically. I think I have some friends that are like, ´Jamie, geez, back off. You´re not going to die tomorrow.´"

She has delved more deeply into the writing of her children´s books and further developed a passion for photography. "We go walking in Santa Monica with our Leicas," says Diana Walker, who took the F-word pictures of Curtis for this article, "and Jamie can see things I can´t see. She´s like a laser." To celebrate her 50th birthday, Curtis is creating a book of her photos to give to friends.

One of her pals is California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, her costar in 1994´s True Lies, and she tells a story that illustrates how friendship in Hollywood can be both long-term and casual. "The other day I´m sitting in the back of my car doing needlepoint, and my phone rings and it´s Arnold, saying" – she breaks into her best Ah-nuld accent – "´I saw you on Oprah, and I want you to know you were terrific, honey.´ It was like, ´Thanks, Arnold. You good?´ ´Yeah.´ ´You´re doing a great job. Bye.´ That was the phone call."

As for what´s next, "I´m hoping that 50 and beyond is about reading and studying and learning," she says. "But I also hope that it´s relaxing and enjoying and participating without it being all about me. I´m not going to become a media conglomerate. I´ve opened myself up for some scrutiny, and now I want my private life." She looks out at the yard and smiles.

The Good Life
On a cool Tuesday evening, Curtis greets me at her front door and welcomes me to a dinner party with a dozen of her girlfriends. Kelly is there, as are Foner Gyllenhaal and Walker and several mothers from Tom´s school. Curtis flits from kitchen to dining room, stopping every so often to hug a friend and praise her work. "I feel sorry for people who don´t know Jamie," says her mother-in-law, Jean Guest.

Mint-and-rosemary lamb chops, giant asparagus, brown rice, and a salad have been laid out buffet style, and Curtis tosses out witticisms as the guests dig in. "This is for the women with hot flashes!" she says, opening a window. Talk meanders from American Idol to Marlene Dietrich´s old pad on Park Avenue in New York, which Curtis rented years ago. "I was dating her grandson, Michael Riva," she confides. "She had a platform bed in a room entirely filled with smoked mirrors."

After a few hours of merriment, we all wind down and Curtis announces she is off to bed. She will be getting up at the crack of dawn, as she does every day in this season of her life. She has – perhaps now more than ever – things to do.

Jamie Lee Curtis

Jamie Lee Curtis is the daughter of Janet Leigh, the sister of Kelly Lee – daughters of Tony Curtis; although one almost writes "Tony Lee". The lee is as in lean, lissome and lovely. At 23, Jamie is the best screamer in Hollywood – in Canada and more recently in Australia. Five films inside two years have vaulted just another film star couples´ brat´ into a cult following. The Queen of the new horror-fantasy brigade... the screen´s first new horror star (and indeed, a female at that) for a decade or so.

She´s a welcome addition to Starburst´s gallery of Fantasy Females. No, forget fantasy! She´s great fun to be with in reality. In the flesh, Exciting. Exuberant. With an enormous zest for life – and her new found career.

She´s such a high octane lass, it´s rather surprising she can acutally sit still long enough to be interviewed. She´s more usually on the go-go. Tennis, surfing, bymnastics, mountain climbing (no wonder whe she guested in a Charlie´s Angel spot, she played a champion golfer). She plays guitar too, paints, uses a camera, writes songs – an lately her first movie treatment. She´s set up her own company with her mother and sister – and she aims to be directing within the next few years.

She´s so busy, five minutes with her would tire even Clark Kent.

John Carpenter found her, of course – languishing in tv-land. His producer, partner, and co-writer, Debra Hill, pushed for her. And that´s how Halloween´s memorable baby-sitter, Laurie Strode, was born... re-born, re-released annually now in America during the Halloween holiday. She´s tested her new found star wings (and very successfully) away from her Carpenter mentor, but she´s back at the moment – and is likely to remain a firm member of the Carpenter clan, bringing her mother into it for The fog, and now neadlining the long-awaited Halloween II film, co-starring Donald Pleasence again. It´s being produced by John and Debra, and directed by their usual art director, Tony Wallace.

And I wouldn´t be surprised if she didn´t turn up in Carpenter´s still-unscripted Western, El Diablo She´s built for Westerns. And John Carpenter´s idol, Howard Hawks, would have loved her. She´s his (Hawk´s or Carpenter´s) kind of woman. Thin, angular, attractive in an off-beat – manner... and not really the helpless, hapless heroine she plays so well.

"She was just one of several girls auditioning for Halloween, "Carpenter recalls of their meeting. "She came to read. She had a tremendous quality, tremendous. Different! Very tomboyish in a way. Yet very sexy – and very pretty, no matter what she says. And I never knew she was related to Janet Leigh at all.

"Debra was the one pushing her the hardest. I had, I must admit, another actress in mind. But Debra kept saying. "Let´s try Jamie..." And it worked out really well". Didn´t it just?

Starburst: Your mother says you were an actress in the cradle, but then all mothers are prone to exaggerate...

Jamie Lee Curtis: I think I was a bit of a ham as a child and had a penchant for playing; acting. We just liked to joke about it. She says I came out tap-dancing. I say, I came out quoting Shakespeare. "Out damned spot!" That never gets a laugh except with the English!

Starburst: How did you decide – and it was obviously a big decision in that town so full of film family relatives jumping into movies – to take up the family business?

Jamie Lee: It was absolutely by happenstance that I got a contract a Universal, when I was on my Christmas break from college.

You mean the 1976 contract was among your christmas presents?

Jamie Lee: Well no, I´d been out meeting people at studios, but not really expecting to get a job. And then I got a job.

Starburst: Just like that?

Jamie Lee: Yeah!

Starburst: Without any training?

Jamie Lee: Yeah! Nothing! I don´t think that college acting classes are suitable for films or television acting. Nowadays films and television are the media acting world. The stage is still around, but it´s not really half as important as it used to be. And nobody give classes in film technique. I feel it´s a very simple thing – acting. If you let it be, it really is very easy to do. But film acting needs certain technique... and should be taught.

Starburst: No doubt you picked up a lot of that technique – at least the techniqual terms and what they meant – at home anyway?

Not a lot. Some. I remember in college having to memorise a list of terms in the theatre – downstage, upstage, left wings, proscenium. But nothing, you see, for film-talk. What is cheating for the camera? What is close-up?What is an off-camera look? What is a two-shot? What is raking?

Starburst: What is raking?

Raking is when you have more than three people in a straight line, but it mustn´t be straight but raked in order for the camera to see everybody... Most people – most actors don´t know these terms. They´reforeign to the usual acting class. There´s cinema schools where you learn the art of film-making... but not film acting. I respect theatre actors, but acting for films – for cameras – is completely different. It´s all broken up into pieces to start with, of course. I mean, I´d like to get some theatre actors and out them in front of the camera and say, "Now do it again... do it again!" And as they´re looking scared, say, because a killer´s coming after them, there´s no dialogue, but you´ll have the director, going. "Right! Look to your right... here he comes, here he comes... Get scared! No, not too much... Bring it down a little... Now, look to your left – very quickly!" And the cameraman´s going, "Take up the focus here... C´mon guys, get it into focus, Jesus Christ!" And they´re all saying things like this as you´re suposed to be acting scared and...

Starburst: Not supposed to be laughing...

Jamie Lee: Not supposed to be listening or looking at them. And it´s very difficult, honest.

Starburst: So how were you, first time on the set in – what – the Operation Petticoat tv series?

I´d done some very small television stuff before, but was just the most foreign thing I´d ever felt. Amazing. This huge machine and eight for a scene, there´s maybe fifteen people around you with cameras and lights, the boom-mike, the lights three inches from your nose. Or worse of all, you´ve a radio-mike taped to your chest! I´ve done more films with radio-mikes and I cannot tell you how awful they are! They have a battery pack that looks twice as big as a packet of cigarettes and weights about 3 lb... oh no, maybe 2lbs. You have to stick that in your pocket, or tape it to your belly. Or if you´re not wearing something tight, tape it to the inside of your thigh, run the wires up and pin the mike to your bra-strap and you must only move in a certain way or the material will ruffle against the mike – it´s a pain in the... But they never think of all that when you´re trying to be intimate with someone in the scene...

Starburst: They sound more trouble then they´re worth.

Jamie Lee: Well, sometimes the proximity of where you´re shooting is not conductive to a boom or long mike. The sound man can´t get in there. If you´re not touching them they´re good. You get a very good, clean sound. But oh boy! once you start moving it´s...like this. (She proceeds to rustle some cigarette pack cellophane in front of my mike; then brushes her hair close to the mike. Noisy!)

Starburst: You seem to enjoy scaring the hell out of your audiences?

Jamie Lee: I don´t know if I enjoy doing it to people. I don´t personally enjoy horror films, myself. In fact, I hate ´em! I will not go to see them. I´ve got to see my own (she chortles) because it´s in the contract! I have to see ´em once!

Starburst: But you must have seen others to make you refuse to see any more?

Jamie Lee: Oh, sure, I used to see – oh! – all of them. All my friends would go "Aw c´mon Jamie, gotta go see these – you´re such a chicken." So I go: "Okay". And I go. But I gotta tell you – never again. I made a pact, actually at New Year´s Day 1980: I´m not going to see another horror film.

Starburst: Which film prompted that?

Jamie Lee: Oh! Something awful, really awful. Alien, I think. I did´t like Alien, I gotta tell you.

Starburst: How did you first get together with John Carpenter?

Jamie Lee: I auditioned for John and Debra Hill for Halloween... when was it? 1978!

Starburst: When he was still a unknown quantity in America?

Jamie Lee: Right! But not in England because of Assult, right? But I did´t know who he was. I had no idea! I read this filmgraphy and it said Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13 – and I´d never heard of either one. I went, uh, okay... I mean his credits could have been Cherryhill High and The Pom Pom Girls for all I knew about him. But I knew from the day we started working that he was wonderful. He´ got such a control.

Starburst: Obviously your close relationship began working on the set?

Jamie Lee: Sure, but at an audition you´re very nervous. When you finally get the job you go back in to say Hello and begin to meet each other. One evening the three girls – Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles and myself – went over to his house and talked about what he wanted our relationship to be. Other than that, I didn´t know him very well. You don´t have the time to get to know people very well before you start shooting. We´d never rehearsed or anything.

Starburst: Were you wary of him? I mean, if we call Halloween a horror film, were´t you –

Jamie Lee: Oh sure, it´s a horror film!

Starburst: Fine, I just didn´t want to get into any Chris Lee-like debate about what is or isn´t a horror vehicle. So... weren´t you rather wary of this young director, completely unknown to you, wanting you for a horror flick, you being the daughter of Janet Leigh of Psycho and all of that possible exploitation.

No! I´ve never been offered a film before. Never ever. Nothing! And I never thought for one minute of the fact that she´s known for Psycho until the Associated Press did a photo-thing of two pictures together. One of her screaming in Psycho and one of me screaming in Halloween. I looked at that and went, "Oh my god!"

Starburst: You really mean to say you haven´t considered the possibility before then?

Jamie Lee: Honestly! Look, my problem is that Psycho was at least twenty films into my mother´s career. God forbid, they´ll only remember me for Halloween! I mean, it´s a wonderful film and I was thrilled to be in people´s debuts are not in such a won-der-ful movie. To make my debut with a lead in a film that is so successful, so widely known and respected is just fabulous...

Starburst: But it´s only the beginning?

Jamie Lee: Hope so.

It sure looks that way. You´ve had three more out already, another awaiting release. Now you´ve done Halloween II. Who knows what you´ll eventually be remembered for? How was the working relationship with John?

Jamie Lee: As I say, he had such a contro. He knew exactly what he wanted, shot for shot. He knew! We showed up and he knew where he was going. And I mean, that film was so low-budget... Halloween was made for $300,000! I mean, it´s illegal how low-budgeted it was! So you don´t have time to mess around with a budget like that. And John sure did. We worked the usual hours, nothing extra. Twenty days we made that film in. A million dollars a day it must have made by now. Easy. And then some.

Starburst: Could you see that it was going to work as you shot it?

Jamie Lee: Nope! I was so nervous. This was my first movie and I was like... (she shivers). All I remember was shaking a lot. I don´t think anybody would have any premonitions that it was gonna be that good – that successful. If we look back before John was known, and I said to my friends, "I´m making a three-hundred-grand horror film called Halloween, shooting twenty days in Pasadena," they´d go "Oh! that´s very nice Jamie, congratulations... I´m doing a 20th Century-Fox film with Peter O´Toole and John Schlesinger´s directing and it´s a $100-million budget...". No one had any idea what Halloween could be. I wasn´t even thinking about that. I was just... shaking

Starburst: Petrified! Not a bad feeling to have. You had to be scared stiff, anyway.

Jamie Lee: Yeah, you´re right, and I´m sure that helped. I´m glad I was a little vulnerable at being a first film, because the girl was very vulnerable. John has taught me a lot about vulnerability.

Starburst: All the top women stars had it – Marilyn more than most.

Jamie Lee: I´m still learning. Of course, in The Fog, all the characters are a little vulnerable because they are all potential victims of a menace that is terrorising the entire town. The more I learn about the art, the more I prefer playing vulnerable people. It gives the audience something to relate to. Without vulnerability, one is usually the heavy or the bad guy.

Starburst: But this was just true to life for you in Halloween?

Jamie Lee: Right! I think I was more petrified than Laurie Strode was. I mean, everyday I came home crying... thinking I was going to be fired... thinking I was going to be awful... that I was awful!

Sarburst: You literally felt you´d be sacked?

Jamie Lee: Oh yeah... right on the first day! The first day I shot, I did one sceene, than they moved locations and I wasn´t in the next scene and by the time I came out of the dressing area – the motor-home, we used – the main people, John and the cameraman, Dean Cundey, and everyone else had already left for the other location, setting everything up. I didn´t get to really talk to them about how the first scenes went. So, I went home crying, saying "Oh my God, they didn´t like it. It must have been awful. I´m going to be fired!" I sat at home waiting for the phone call telling me I was out. Dropped! Then I got a call that night from John – no, acutally I got a message that he´d called and would call me back. And I went, "Oh damn, oh dammit, I´d dead, I´m dead, I´ve slipped... my first chance to do a movie and boom! it´s gone!"

Then John called me back and he said, "I just wanna tell you, Jamie, you´re fabulous." It was, I remember, very late, about 11 or 12 that night, I was just going to bed, crying myself to sleep and he called and said, "You did a wonderful job today. I think it´s great!"

Starburst: Knowing how fickle actors can be, did that really set you up for the next day´s shooting, or make you neurotic again wondering if you could live up to it?

Jamie Lee: Are you kidding? I went back mext day on Cloud 99. I was the most contented young woman in Los Angeles that night.I went to sleep like a baby.

Starburst: Born in Hollywood – literally and cinematically – raised to further cult levels in Canada, you´ve now been down-under to Australia for a movie with those guys who have been doing rather well with horror subjects, director Richard Franklin and writer Everett de Roche.

Jamie Lee: Yeah. I like them, too. Didja ever see their Patrick? Wonderful movie. I screend it in Hollywood because I wanted to see Richard´s work, and the movie was okay. Better than that, the movie was won-der-ful! The only reason I didn´ like some of it was because it was dubbed with American voiced, or what they thought were American voices – at least they were less Australian accents. The dubbing was off. Badly. Whe you dub a whole movie, with people who didn´t actually give the performance, it´s never the same.

Starburst: You´re telling me? I live in Paris where you appear to speak French perfectement!

Jamie Lee: So you know what I mean. The dubbing was bad. But I loved the film. The visuals. I absolutely thought he was so wonderful a director... with the typewriter writing all the messages, and things shooting out everywhere. Dammit, it was great!

Starburst: So how´s your Road Games with Franklin?

Jamie Lee: Well, let´s get one thing straight – Road Games isn´t a horror film.

Starburst: You could have fooled me. What´s the ad hype..."On a 1600 mile stretch of desert highway, someone is playing a game of sex, violence... and sudden death." That sounds like Halloween on the Road!

Jamie Lee: No, it´s Bogart and Bacall on the road...!

Starburst: If you say so. But look at the newest Avco Embassy hype on it. "A bizarre and brutal series of crimes involve young, female hitch-hikers and a trucker who becomes both suspect and potential victim."

Jamie Lee: Wait and see... just you wait and see! Everett de Roche wrote the script and it´s oh! much, much, much better – phenomenally better! – than any horror ghing he´s done the Patrick, Long Weekend, Snapshot or Harlequin. It´s great psychological thriller – and it´s not at all graphic.

Starburst: Well, that certainly takes if out of today´s horror market!

Jamie Lee: Stacy Keach is just wonderful in it. I´m a hitch-hiker and he picks me up. There´s been lotta murders in this area, and he has this theory whodunnit and why he´s dunnit. We talk about this and – it´s all thinking, Smith and Jones Game. "Let´s call this guy Smith or Jones... Now, what did he do with the bodies?" It´s fabulous, really interesting.

Starburst: Won-der-ful, in fact?

Jamie Lee: Right! I´m thrilled about it.

Starburst: So far you´re maded seven movies, created a huge fan following... and you´ve already formed your own company.

Jamie Lee: Yes, Generation Productions with my mother and my sister, Kelly Lee.

Starburst: What kind of films in Generations generating?

Jamie Lee: We´re not sure yet, we´re in development stages on a couple of television things and one feature... But I like that expression! You´re just given me our ad for the trade papers: Generation is generating!

Starburst: Great, just give me the company address for my bill...

Jamie Lee: The idea behind the company is that instead of sitting around waiting for jobs, we´re at least gonna try to generate our own.

Starburst: You don´t seem to be sitting around much of late. Not even here!

Jamie Lee: That time can come quicker than you know it. So during those periods of time, I´ll be happily writing things, thinking up and developing things, rather than sitting around doing nothing and just waiting for the phone to ring.

Starburst: You´re writing your own screenplays?

Jamie Lee: I already did. Well, not a complete screenplay. I´m not capable of doing anything more than a twenty-age treatment, but I´ve done that – and that will definately be for Generation. Maybe a big production company will buy it, I don´t know... I don´t want to talk about it, because none ot it is set or really formed yet. It´s only twenty pages... very little.

Starburst: But which direction are you wanting to head in next?

Jamie Lee: No horror! Well, to tell you the truth, I wrote a horror film. It´s absolutely fabulous.

Starburst: Is that the title or a modest description?

Jamie Lee: (Laugh). No, the title is The Myth. And it´s won-der-ful. I´m really excited about it and it´s definitely for Generation, oh! definately. Could be fun. It could be made as a Roger Corman low-budget movie, I don´t care. It´s my idea and it´s my horror film. I´m gonna make one!

Starburst: And after Halloween II, that´s the last one you´ll make?

Jamie Lee: Well, it´s not even a horror-horror film. It´s a natural disaster film. All these natural disasters happen at once and... but wait, wait!

Starburst: You talk quite technically about filming, equipment, you´ve dreamed up a film of your own – would you like to direct it?

Jamie Lee: Oh, I´m planning to do that.

Starburst: Silly question!

Jamie Lee: I will – or at least I may – direct my own horror film.

Starburst: The one that isn´t a horror film?

The Myth, yeah.

Starburst: Soon?

Jamie Lee: No, I don´t want to do it soon. In the next five to ten years.

Starburst: What´s your sister´s part in Generation. She hasn´t followed in the family tradition, I gather.

Jamie Lee: She is a stockbroker.

Starburst: Sounds like a useful sister.

Jamie Lee: She works with my step-father. She´s very good, too. A wonderful businesswoman. She´ll be the business side of our company – and helping on the creative side, as well. See, it´s an opportunity for all three of us to play a little, to, you know, just try. God knows, maybe one of the ideas will work... I´ve got a great idea for a sitcom, a situation comedy series on tv. Can´t tell you what it is. God, I wish I could. But it´s...

Starburst: Won-der-ful?

Jamie Lee: Well, it´s really very good!

Starburst: All this sounds as if we could be losing you from our fantasy films just when we´ve found you. All your horror films have been modern, set here, now, today. Would you liked to have tried some Gothic stuff... to tangle with Hammer Films, Chris Lee and company?

Jamie Lee: I´d much rather have worked for Hitchcock – or a real good classic horror film-maker. I think John Carpenter is very close to that, and Richard Franklin is very Hitchcockian in his films – God, I hate that term. Hitchcockian! Franklin is Franklinian! I hate to use that term because Hitchcock´s one in a million. God, he´s so wonderful!

Starburst: What about some of your favorite moments in Halloween, The fog, etc?

Jamie Lee: Well, there´s one moment in Halloween, a real silly thing to want to put on my reel of film clips, because I don´t scream in it. I´m not yelling. I´m just walking across the street. From the moment when I leave the hose and lock the door, walk to the other door across the street – John used the Steadicam, going boom to the house, back to me, back to the house, back to me – and all the time my face remains emotionless. That´s my favorite scene.

Starburst: After talking with you here, it´s difficult to remember you ever being emotionless – or indeed motionless. You´re all go!

Jamie Lee: Oh c´mon, I´m boring. I´m ab-so-lute-ly boring!

Starburst: Not here, you´re not. At home, maybe.

Jamie Lee: I live in this little house in Studio City, California, Surburbia, USA. I have a dog named Clark, I have two cats, Yuri and Emilia, named after the characters in The Turning Point, I have a boyfriend. Not necessarily in that order... but maybe so. I do the dishes, I wash my clothing. I have a washer-drier that I got for my 20th birthday.

Starburst: That´ll do. You´re ruining your image...

Jamie Lee: I have a maple tree in the back yard and a hammock. Wind-decks. No pool. A pool? Me. Little me. I gotta tell ya, I´m real boring. I read. I watch tv. I watch the news. I´m really boring, Tony. Amazinly enough, I am boring!

Kid Friendly

Successful as An Author, Mellower About Hollywood, Jamie Lee Curtis Learns to Laugh Over Spilled Milk

Of course Jamie Lee Curtis was thrilled when her third children´s book earned glowing notices two years ago and made the New York Times bestseller list. For an actress perhaps best known as the scream queen in Halloween, being taken seriously as an author really is something to shout about. But nothing beats the reaction she gets from a certain subset of her fans. "I love that I can make little boys laugh when I use the word ´diarrhea´ successfully in a rhyme," says Curtis, 41, referring to the glee that erupts at readings when she recites lines like, "Today I am cranky, so nothing seems right. I have diarrhea and broke my new kite."

The kids who shriek at those lines have probably never seen her in films like A Fish Called Wanda or True Lies. But with 1.2 million books sold, Curtis can count on a loyal following for her latest volume, Where Do Balloons Go? An Uplifting Mystery. "Jamie is a writer who just happens to be a celebrity," says Curtis´s editor, HarperCollins senior vice president Joanna Coder. "She´s a very serious writer, and that´s why her books are so incredibly successful." Critics agree: Her tales have been called "quite charming" by The New Yorker and "expressive and inviting" by Kirkus Reviews.

Curtis says storytelling is her true calling. "These are wonderful books," she says. "You´ll never hear me say that about anything else I do, except maybe my Caesar salads. These books are the closest thing to letting anybody know who I am."

What she is foremost is a mother to Annie, 13, and Tom, 4. In fact, Curtis began writing children´s books in 1992, when Annie had just turned 5, with When I Was Little: A Four-Year-Old´s Memoir of Her Youth. Annie, who is adopted, also played a key role in her mother´s second book, Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born, in 1996. That one was difficult, Curtis acknowledges, because it involved " ´outing´ my family, as a gift to help other adopted children." The book sold more than 150,000 copies and paved the way for her ´98 bestseller Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day.

By Hollywood standards, Curtis, the daughter of actors Tony Curtis, 75, and Janet Leigh, 73, had a relatively placid childhood – even though her parents divorced when she was 3. (Her sister Kelly Curtis, 44, is also an actress.) The summer g she was 13, Curtis went to Sardinia to visit her father – and decide which parent she wanted to live with. It was during that wrenching time that she discovered the joy of reading. "It was a very weird summer, and I felt like a fish out of water," she recalls. "Then I found a copy of [James Clavell´s] King Rat, and it saved me. I lost myself in it."

After graduating from the tony Choate Rosemary Hall school in Connecticut in 1976, Curtis went into her parents´ line of work, appearing in more than two dozen films. But she rarely found acting satisfying. "It doesn´t fill me up with self-esteem," she says.

In 1984 Curtis married actor-writer Christopher Guest, now 52, whom she met in 1983. Although she still acts in the occasional film – including The Tailor of Panama with Pierce Brosnan, which will be released in December – Curtis consciously began slowing down five years ago. She was so driven and frenetic, Curtis says, friends called her Terminator. The first step was getting "sober," says Curtis, who calls her substance-abuse problem and recovery "private." She now focuses her full attention on family and writing. Guest says his wife is a natural at both: "She relates absolutely to kids."

These days, Curtis walks her little boy to and from preschool through a shady canyon of eucalyptus trees near the family´s four-bedroom Los Angeles home. "My kids have taught me that the more and more I let go, the better," she says. "Let someone else try to rule the world. I don´t want to."

Making a Splash

Jamie Lee Curtis has a great marriage, a cute kid, a hot movie (True Lies) and, at 35, a self-deprecating sexiness that won´t quit

On a clear, sweltering Idaho morning, Jamie Lee Curtis is hiking through the sage-covered mountains with her beloved dogs Lucy and Henry. She´s enviably trim and fit, but the steep trail soon has Curtis panting. Not that any wilderness trail could ever sap her spirit or her sassiness. "I hate you," she says, nonchalantly, to a companion who is not sweating quite as much as she. In a moment, though, the 35-year-old actress is moving again and chattering away about her role as Arnold Schwarzenegger´s wife in the summer hit True Lies ("She´s the most well-rounded character I´ve ever gotten to play") and the rough pleasures of her mountain retreat ("It reduces you to nothing but a winded bag of bones"). Then, suddenly, the subject is dogs, particularly the late great Clark, an impish poodle-mutt who died two years ago. "Poor dead Clark," she moans. "No bark Clark. I channel his voice, you know. Sometimes I call people and leave messages in his voice."

In a few moments, Curtis reaches a ridge overlooking a valley – and settles on a more serious subject: the recent death of her half-brother Nicholas. Her eyes seem to cloud over as she pulls a water bottle from her fanny pack and shoves it first into Lucy´s and Henry´s mouths, then drinks from it herself. Nicholas, the 23-year-old son of her father, Tony Curtis, and his third wife, Leslie Allen, was a musician with a history of substance abuse who died of a drug overdose in Provincetown, Mass., on July 2.

On the morning she arrived back in Idaho after the funeral, Curtis says, she found a gray feather in this same mountain clearing and tucked it into the mesh crown of her ever-present baseball cap. And there the tattered plume still flutters. "I just sort of thought it was him," she says. "It´s so hard to imagine he´s gone. He really touched a lot of people. I miss him so much." She begins to cry. A wind comes over the ridge, stirring up the scent of sage, and Curtis wipes the tears away. "Besides my grandmother, I´ve never lost anybody in my family. It´s so sad. But it made me realize that although my father had children from three different marriages, we´re still very much a family, and we mourn together like a family."

Curtis´s life these days is full and complicated – but rich. Her 10-year-old marriage to actor-director Christopher Guest, perhaps best known as one of the metal-brained band members in 1984´s This Is Spinal Tap, is, by her own description, the picture of domestic bliss. The couple has an 8-year-old daughter, Annie, whose existence, says Curtis, "is the most profound, nondescribable event of my life" – and whose adoption inspired the actress to write a book about that aspect of motherhood. Among her other accomplishments, she says, is that "I make the best Caesar salad anyone has ever tasted. In some circles," she adds, "I´m as famous for it as I am for my breasts." And then – oh, yeah – there´s this movie-star stuff, which makes Curtis "real proud of what I´ve accomplished."

About a week after Nicholas´s funeral, her megabudget action-comedy True Lies opened across America, instantly providing Curtis with the biggest boost of her 17-year career. And though some have called the movie mi-sogynistic because of the way Curtis´s character is manipulated by Schwarzenegger in several scenes, Lies also gives Curtis a chance to play the action-heroine role to the hilt. She has, after all, been almost everything else. Starting out as Hollywood´s "Scream Queen" in 1978´´s Halloween, she was dubbed the Body after her sexpot roles in Trading Places and Perfect; Curtis then became a comedian in 1988´sA Fish Called Wanda and the ABC-TV series Anything but Love before becoming a mother figure in My Girl and Forever Young. And Jamie has always been an actress whom men find sexy and women like for her endearing earthiness.

True Lies´ Helen Tasker, though, is something else again – a mousy, repressed housewife who is transformed into a superspy, decking the bad guys while decked out in decolletage. It is, in more ways than one, the role of Curtis´s life. "Helen," she says, "is a combination of mother, wife and someone who doesn´t want to draw too much attention to herself for the sake of her family."

Can this be the same, foulmouthed Jamie who once proclaimed herself "a twisted creature" and "a trash bag of a woman"? Indeed, Curtis has mellowed and come of age, in her fashion. Surefooted in her Nike running shoes, she sprints down the mountain trail, still chattering all the way. Back at her rustic, three-bedroom home in a nearby valley, she finds her husband and daughter about to head off to the town swimming pool. Annie leaps into her mother´s arms, wrapping her legs around Curtis´s waist; they hug, talk for a minute, and then Annie is on her way. "With a marriage and a child, my life is this blend of being wild and carefree, and on another level careful and cautious," she says. "It´s weird but I´m really happy."

Curtis has a ready explanation for her blissful domesticity – her own relatively normal upbringing in the abnormal world of Hollywood. "My mom instilled a lot of good, concrete values," she says, "respect, how you treat people, the importance of family and friends." Curtis was only 3 years old in 1962 when her father and her mother, actress Janet Leigh, divorced. She and her older sister Kelly grew up with Leigh and their stepfather, stockbroker Bob Brandt, in the woodsy environs of L.A.´s Benedict Canyon. "I remember a little countrified life with the two of us putting on shows in the basement," she says. "My mom let us children stay children."

As she grew to adolescence, though, her relationship with her natural father evaporated. He became "a stranger, then a real stranger, then an enemy," Curtis has said of her father. Tony admits that his drug and alcohol problems, and his prolonged absences, drove a wedge between them that lasted for years. "I didn´t see much of her as a child," he says. "But she was very interesting – introverted at one point, different. We didn´t start being friends until she was 17 or 18." Now Curtis talks to her father – and mother – on the phone at least once a week. "We have a great, funny relationship," he says. "We´re very tight."

Curtis recalls herself as a natural ham who wanted to pursue acting right after attending Connecticut´s tony Choate School, but her mother insisted she go to college first. "I didn´t want her to be just another kid in the business, because I´d seen so many who turned out unhappy," says Leigh. Curtis dropped out of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., her mother´s alma mater, after one semester. Her first job was two lines in a 1976 episode of Quincy; two years later she was the shrieking suburban teen in John Carpenter´s low-budget Halloween. She made six more horror flicks during the next several years – a time when she has admitted to experimenting with cocaine.

In the summer of 1983 – the year she made Trading Places – Jamie decided it was time to clean up her act. Not long afterward, Curtis, who had dated rocker Adam Ant and been engaged to production designer Michael Riva, was thumbing through a copy of Rolling Stone when she saw a picture of Guest gussied up in his Spinal Tap gear. In his smirk, Curtis suspected a kindred spirit and, on the spur of the moment, called his agent. Guest didn´t call back; it was a time, he said, when "bizarre women were calling at 3 or 4 in the morning." But they met by chance two months later at an L.A. restaurant and fell in love. "It´s hard to talk about Chris, because all you´re going to hear is the word ´great,´ " she says. "He´s a great listener, a great athlete, a great husband and father." At home in Los Angeles, the couple pretty much shun the celebrity circuit; Guest is particularly fierce about keeping their lives private.

Curtis thinks her own pragmatism about matters of the heart also helps them stay happy. "I´m not a dreamer, never have been," she says. "I admire people who can see a romantic comedy and get lost in it, but I have the problem of going back home and trying to deal with a real marriage, which is very different from that." Curtis also rules out working on joint projects with Guest. "We collaborate in bed, you know?" she says with a smirk.

Besides, Curtis would hardly have wanted her husband around on the True Lies set, especially during her much-talked-about dance scene in a bra and panties – a bump-and-grinding, bedpost-licking number that ticked off more than a few feminists. The rap against the movie is that Curtis´s character often winds up in humiliating situations. Curtis had her own problem with the dance routine: She doesn´t see herself as a siren. "My looks, in my opinion, have never been something that´s good about me," she says. To be as presentable as possible, she dieted hard-core and exercised daily. "What was great was that Helen was nervous, so / got to be nervous," she says. As for what she calls "the brouhaha" about antifemale overtones, Curtis says, "If someone wants to say that, then that´s fine. I´m not going to make a case to defend it, because I frankly think it´s fabulous and funny, and they should lighten up."

For his part, True Lies director James Cameron (Terminator 2, Aliens) loved Curtis´s naughty-girl humor. "Jamie fell into a real groove with Arnold because they´re both jokers and they´ve both got gutter mouths," he says. Jamie did indeed hit it off with the big guy. "I didn´t expect to become friends after the movie – that´s unusual for me – but we are. With Arnold everything you see and hear is the truth. He really is that big, friendly, self-deprecating man."

There are some matters Curtis takes quite seriously. Reaching into a clutch of framed pictures in a corner of the family room, Curtis finds the one of grandpa Tony holding baby Annie. "Nothing cuter in the world than that, huh? My baby´s so sweet," she gushes. "I refuse to be just a witness to my daughter´s youth. I want to participate in it as long as she´ll let me." For now, that includes reading Annie her bedtime stories, painting and hiking together and being an active member of the school carpool.

Motherhood has also spawned a writing career. Curtis has published one children´s book, last year´s When I Was Little, and her new work, Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born, is due next year. Inspired by Annie – whom Curtis and Guest adopted at birth – Tell Me is a celebration of birth from an adopted child´s point of view. Curtis´s other great passion is photography. Longtime friend Lisa Birnbach, author of The Official Preppy Handbook, says Curtis´s best work was taking the first pictures of Lisa and her newborn baby at Manhattan´s Mount Sinai Medical Center in 1990. "For security reasons no one is allowed in the room with mother and baby, so Jamie hid under the bed for more than an hour before they brought Sam in," Lisa recalls. Curtis says she´s seriously thinking about pursuing photography full-time in the not-too-distant future. "As soon as the issue of my looks gets to be difficult," she says, "I just won´t act anymore. It´s no big declaration. The older you get, the harder it is to do it. Maybe in my early 40s, I´d love to not live my life up on a movie screen."

Even now, she´s being choosy. Her next project is a Wanda sequel, which doesn´t start filming until next spring. And until then she would like to spend as much time as possible away from L.A. and back in Idaho, where folks are friendly, families are happy – and you can kibitz to your heart´s content. Finished hiking for the day, Curtis stops by the town juice bar, where she eyes a father and son standing by the counter. "Where´s your wife?" she asks the man, with mock snappishness. He doesn´t recognize Curtis. "Oh, probably around here shopping," he says.

"You´re saying that just because she´s a woman, aren´t you? For all you know, she´s toiling to keep you and your family alive," Curtis chides.

"Well, I guess you could be right," he says.

"Of course I´m right," she replies. Then, suddenly, Curtis melts, smiles – and shoves her glass at him. "Now here," she says, "have some of my veggie drink."

Another Hollywood brat breaks through: It´s Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leighand Tony Curtis

She credits her rocker love with ´making me humble in this crazy business´

In her movie debut in something called Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis, 20, is cast as the target of a psychopath playing homicidal trick-or-treat with babysitters in a small Illinois town. Halloween can´t hold a candy bar to, say, Psycho or The Boston Strangler, and no one would think to compare a cheesy B-chiller with those classics, except that Jamie´s mother, Janet Leigh, was Psycho´s unforgettable knifing-in-theshower victim, and her father, Tony Curtis, was the Strangler.

None of that daunts Jamie. "I´m proud of my parents," she says. "But I´m me." As for Halloween, she admits, "It´s nothing super-artsy." But the tall and shapely actress justly calls her depiction of the bookish, repressed heroine "a true accomplishment." Already confident of her craft (she was in last year´s original cast of ABC´s Operation Petticoat), Jamie declares that she could turn around and "play a whore tomorrow." Off-camera she characterizes herself variously as "spontaneous and wild," "hyper but moody," "weird yet subtle."

That´s mostly self-melodrama on the part of a basically levelheaded lady who´s never gone haywire in the Brooke Hayward Hollywood tradition. "I felt weird for her," comments Jamie, who adjusted well to her own parents´ divorce when she was 3½. If Jamie is much closer to the man who became her stepfather immediately thereafter, stockbroker Bob Brandt, well, "

Who raised me?" she asks. "People may think I don´t love Tony," Jamie notes without malice. "But I just don´t know him that well." She does own up to problems from a precocious childhood. "You lose something growing up, because your friends grow up at a slower pace." Jamie also learned that "many people want to be your friends just because you have famous parents." Worse, she vulnerably discovered some of Hollywood´s best acting came from supposed friends who "hurt me a lot."

Her solution? "Getting choosier," for one thing, and socializing less with Beverly Hills types. For two months she has been dating Johnny Lee Schell, 30, a rock guitarist. "With Johnny I was a little more wary than usual," she reports. "So I got to know him better instead of getting involved quickly. I´ve never felt more myself in a male-female relationship."

Jamie lives in a modest tract house in the San Fernando Valley, but with hairdresser friend Tina Cassaday, not Schell. She stays off the party-disco circuit and is a confessed "cleanliness freak" who does her own housework (but leaves her laundry for her mother´s cleaning lady every week). Indeed, she enjoys a warm and loving relationship with Leigh. On a recent talk show, even My Mother, My Self author Nancy Friday gasped at how openly Jamie can discuss sex with her mother.

As for apprenticeship in the business, Jamie has had little formal training– or what she dismisses as "learning from out-of-work actors." But she unconsciously tapped years of back-lot memories as a child. Leigh used to take Jamie and older sister Kelly to sets all around the world until she sensed that travel was hurting the kids´ friendships at home. Both Leigh and Brandt worked hard not to spoil the girls. "Jamie wore Kelly´s handmedown dresses," says Mother, "and I also encouraged them to share their toys and clothes with those less fortunate."

Though Leigh recognized Jamie´s flair for "organizing skits and plays as a child," she urged her "to be a kid, go to parties and be a cheerleader" until she was at least 18. But after six restless months at the University of the Pacific, Jamie slipped out for an audition and wound up on ABC´s Petticoat (ironically, Tony Curtis starred in the 1959 screen original). "

Being one of 18 people on a set for a half-hour show is no joy," she found. "I got one line a week." But, more important, the ego-jostling initiation –and the unceremonious cast jettisoning after one season–confirmed her healthy dislike of Hollywood hubris. "I don´t know if I´d want a huge rise real quick," Jamie declares. "I feel the biggest problem with this business is that people have stopped feeling lucky and think they deserve all this."