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Donna Freydkin has spent 10-plus years interviewing celebrities for major publications, and has written for a variety of outlets such as USA Today, Allure, Yahoo! and CNN covering topics such as films, family and favorite meals.
Jamie Lee Curtis Never Thought She’d Be a Mom. Now, She’s a Grandma
The Oscar winner never saw this coming. And she has a lot to say about it
Jamie Lee Curtis at the California Hall of Fame Ceremony in Sacramento in March 2026 — the same month she revealed she had become a grandmother for the first time.
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Key takeaways
- Curtis says becoming a first‑time grandmother is the greatest gift of her life, far more meaningful than any career milestone.
- Her grandson’s birth arrived just a week after the tragic deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, a loss the family is still processing.
- Facing grief and mortality head‑on, Curtis says these moments fuel her urgency to love fully and pursue what matters most.
Just call her granny.
Before she could say a word about it publicly, Jamie Lee Curtis, 67, had to call her eldest daughter Annie and her husband for permission. That is how she handles the big things. With care. With the understanding that the most precious things in life are not the awards or the roles.
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“Forget the movies, forget the things, forget the shiny things,” Curtis told Michelle Obama on the IMO podcast, which aired April 1. “The shiniest thing is a child. The greatest gift is a child and getting the privilege of raising them and learning how to help someone through their life.”
Annie, 39, and her husband welcomed a baby boy in December. Curtis and her husband, actor-comedian Christopher Guest, are first-time grandparents.
“I never thought I would have children,” Curtis, who graced the cover of AARP The Magazine in 2025, said on the podcast. “I never thought in my wildest dreams I would be a grandma. A granny. I want to be granny. It has just been an extraordinary connection.”
The arrival came wrapped in grief. Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, Annie’s godparents, were killed in their Los Angeles home on Dec. 14, 2025 — one week before the baby was born.
“Rob and Michele are her godparents, and they died on her birthday,” Curtis said on the podcast. “And my beautiful daughter, who loved them, as we all did, managed to be able to metabolize that grief and sadness as we have all had to do. And then my daughter and her husband brought their son to this world a week later.”
She and Guest adopted Annie in December 1986 and their younger daughter Ruby, now 30, in 1996. Now there is a grandson. Life keeps moving forward.
Jamie Lee Curtis and her eldest daughter Annie in Hollywood in 2024.
Getty Images
In 2023, Curtis received AARP’s Career Achievement Award during the 21st annual Movies for Grownups Awards. Also in 2023, she won an Oscar for best supporting actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is the same woman who told AARP in March, for the premiere of Scarpetta — the Prime Video series she spent five years willing into existence — that mortality is not something she fears. It is something she uses.
“Mortality is simply an activator for me,” she said. “I have some shit to do before I go, and I’m going to try to do it.”
In that same AARP interview, recorded in the months after the Reiners were killed, she said: “In my personal life, there’s been a lot of death and loss in the last three months that has rocked us all. If anything, it makes you get up the next morning with more passion, more need to do what you’re here to do, say what you need to say, love who you need to love.”
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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