Jamie Lee Curtis: 'Finding What I'm Really Good At'
By: Jake Miller Source: AARP.org Date Posted: 2005-09-30 00:00:00-04:00
Our scene opens in 1978. A young Jamie Lee Curtis is screaming her way through John Carpenter's Halloween. She's playing Laurie Strode, the role that will launch her film career. Years go by and, in that pinnacle of aerobics genre films, Perfect, Curtis evolves from The Scream Queen to The Body. Then come A Fish Called Wanda and the critically acclaimed television series Anything but Love, and Curtis transforms herself again, into a top-notch comedic talent. She earns Golden Globes for her work in Anything but Love and for a role in the Arnold Schwarzenegger action hit True Lies.
Today, Curtis is a best-selling children's book author, winner of a national teacher's award, and applies some rigorous criteria to any film project she's pitched: Can I get home for dinner? How long do I have to be away from my kids? Do I get to work with my friends? "I've learned what I'm good at," Curtis says, when she reaches me by phone from her Los Angeles home. "Besides my children's books, there's nothing else in my life — except some of my cooking and perhaps the way I am with my kids — that I would tell you I'm great at."
Since the 1993 release of Curtis's first book, When I Was Little: A Four-Year-Old's Memoir of Her Youth, she has sold millions of copies of her six children's books, all done in collaboration with artist Laura Cornell. The books deal with tricky subjects in serious but light-hearted ways. Where Do Balloons Go? is a charming, touching story about growing up and away. It's a primer on letting go and dealing with loss and change in life that offers lessons for both parents and kids. Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born is about adoption (Curtis and her husband, Christopher Guest — best known as This Is Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel and as the writer/director of comedies like Best in Show — adopted their two children). The books appeal to the serious, grown-up side of little kids and the whimsical, playful side of adults. Curtis's words are sensitive and sweet, and Cornell's art offers hidden gems — like a man whose toupee comes off along with his party hat — that keep parents engaged through repeated readings.
Growing Up. "I don't need my very talented psychiatrist to tell you my childhood was not that rosy," Curtis says. "It wasn't Dickensian, but it wasn't rosy. I think as a child I used fantasy as a real avenue for escape." Curtis says she used to set up elaborate "forts" to act out her adventures. "I'd play secretary and set up a whole office," she says. "I'd pretend to answer the phone and talk to the person on the other end and write little messages."
"When I took dance as a kid it wasn't fun, it was something I felt I had to do, like something out of A Chorus Line: 'Up a steep and very narrow stairway, to the voice like a metronome, it wasn't paradise but it was home,'" she says, quoting lines from one of the Broadway musical's songs "At the Ballet" — about young girls who dream of being ballerinas to please their parents and escape the harsh reality of everyday life.
Curtis's daughter, Annie, took dance classes at a studio called the Dance Factory. "It's a fabulous place for young girls to get their ya-yas out," she says. "The people who run it are rock chicks, but they're also serious dancers." Annie went to competitions all over the state, and more important, she loved it.
Curtis hopes her books will help kids find ways to deal with the challenges of growing up. "I think childhood is very hard. We try to make it easy for kids. We don't like to see them in pain," she says. "When parents look at their privileged, pampered kids, they tend to say 'you don't have it hard.' But I think being a child is hard, that there's an underlying seriousness to their lives. Just acknowledging that they are people in that struggle — the same kind of struggle we're in as adults — that's where the books were born."
Curtis would like her books to remind kids — and parents — that it's OK to be sad and angry and silly. You can still like yourself if you're picked last for kickball or if someone thinks you dress funny; self esteem is based on who you are and what you think and feel and do, not on what you wear. In I'm Gonna Like Me: Letting Off a Little Self Esteem, she writes, "I'm gonna like me wearing flowers and plaid. I have my own style, I don't follow some fad." But self-esteem also isn't about pretending that everything a child does is perfect or rewarding them constantly. "If they think there's going to be a prize at the end of everything, they haven't learned delayed gratification."
My Greatest Moment in School. At the 2001 American Teacher Awards, Curtis received a Frank G. Wells Award recognizing those who teach from outside the profession. When she heard about the honor, she thought of her favorite teacher, George Fourgis, who taught her 8th-grade American History.
"At the beginning of the year he said, 'I'm going to talk to you about history and tell you stories.' Three times a year, we had to write oral reports," she recalls. " 'I want you to hear the history in stories, and I want you to learn to tell it that way,' he said. 'If you stand up and read your notes, you'll pass. If you do anything creative, your grade will improve,' " Curtis says. "I still can't spell a word, I count on my fingers, and I speak French with an impeccable accent but with nonexistent grammar. But I remember everything we learned in that class." Her first oral report was on Paul Revere's ride. "I did a report as if I was a flea," she says. "I dressed up like a flea, made a little flea costume. I was the first one to go. I went into the bathroom, changed into my flea costume, came into class, and said, 'Hi, I'm a flea.' And I told the story of Paul Revere's ride from the point of view of a flea, starting on the horse, then jumping to the wig. That was the single greatest moment for me in school," she says. "For the American Teacher Awards, I found him — he was living in Palm Desert — and they sent a car, and I took him as my date."
"I admire teachers so much," she says. "It's such an undervalued profession. You have to be doing it for years to see the rewards, when someone comes up and says, 'You may not remember me, but because of you, I decided to be a teacher.'"
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