Jamie Lee Curtis, 66, is at the Height of Her Career. The Key? ‘Freedom’

Then, 26 years ago, something happened to Curtis that changed all that — something that let her break out of the “boxes” she says the industry kept her parents in. And it had nothing to do with show business: It was sobriety.

The story of the actor quitting her addiction to prescription painkillers and alcohol is by now widely known. Just starting her fifth decade, she was led to her decision by several moments of self-awareness: recognizing herself while reading the memoir of an addict and receiving a warning from a healer friend.

There was no catastrophic crash. “I was what they call a high bottom,” Curtis says. Nonetheless, she sought help by attending meetings at a Presbyterian church (which burned down earlier this year in the Palisades Fire near her home in Santa Monica). Though her mother was a regular reader of Daily Word, a magazine collection of spiritual teachings, and her father was Jewish, Curtis was raised without religion. “I went to no organized religious groupings,” she says. “I never had any religious affiliation at all until I got sober.” But upon finding sobriety, she also found, to her surprise, a connection to God. “What grouped sobriety requires is a belief in something bigger than you,” she explains.

Today, she notes more than once that the deity she recognizes “is a God of my understanding. There’s no dogma attached to it. I really don’t know what God is, and I don’t have to be able to qualify or quantify that.”

As with so much of Jamie Lee Curtis at this point in her life, her beliefs, her practices and her choices are intentional and, always, very much her own.

She has arrived at this place in part because with sobriety also came community for Curtis, who until then had been a largely solitary person: “I didn’t know when I got sober that I was going to meet others who faced the same demons, who were in the same prison and who found the same salvation.” She then adds one simple explanatory note about her recovery relationships: “They are the ones who understand.”

Curtis has made her appreciation for shared experience and empathy a driving force in her life. A morning person, rising between 4 and 5 a.m., she spends her first hours awake corresponding with “hundreds of people,” often using her Instagram account to share encouragement. She is a voracious reader and especially favors materials containing life lessons, such as The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo, which she turns to daily. She also delights in her ability as a public figure to curate and celebrate the teachings, learnings and experiences of writers, musicians, podcasters, filmmakers and others whose works speak to her.

But in the end, maintaining the hard-won freedom that sobriety has brought her—the release from what she describes as “the prison of addiction” — rests on her alone. So she remains vigilant. “The truth is that addiction wants you dead, period, end of story,” Curtis says forcefully. “It will sit here at this table with us waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. The minute the perfect storm of life on life’s terms occurs, and it will — a work situation goes south, your personal relationship goes south, your physical health goes south, a natural disaster occurs — and that outlet of a drink or drug, or whatever it was which relieved you of the feelings before, will remind you that they’re still there.”

By late 2021, all the reading and learning and sharing that Curtis had been doing had led to an internal confidence that she credits with landing her new and different roles in Hollywood. She also says that she could not have played Deirdre Beaubeirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once had she not experienced how hard life can be and found the freedom to be undaunted by that. Still, she “never, ever, ever, ever, ever thought” she would find herself seated with other major nominees in the front row of Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre at the 2023 Academy Awards. Her voice breaks when she talks about her also-­nominated costars Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, who, like her, had been in the business for years while contending with lukewarm recognition. (Yeoh won best actor for the film.) She mentions her friend Demi Moore, nominated for the first time for an Oscar earlier this year for playing an aging celebrity in The Substance, a performance that, ironically, Curtis says allowed Moore to tell the world something Curtis deeply understands: “I am more than you think.”

Since her 2023 best supporting actress Oscar win for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Curtis’ Hollywood career has exploded with opportunity.

Andrew Eccles

So, as she approaches her 67th birthday (she often mistakenly says she is already 67, unconsciously aging herself, which is hilariously rare for a woman in her line of work), Curtis intends to keep putting herself out there as an actor ready to take on complex roles. She also intends to keep producing film and television projects that will allow her colleagues to do the same. “I’m a little bit of a story truffle pig,” she jokes of her newfound ability to sniff out compelling entertainment projects.

And because she is more than work, Curtis intends to continue immersing herself in the practice of what she calls “dying alive.” She says: “I am more alive today than I was when I was 37 years old. Or 47. Or 57. Way more alive. Dying alive has to do with constant curiosity, and that is freedom to me.”

Curtis and her husband of 40 years, actor-comedian Christopher Guest, 77, have lived in their barrel-­tiled Spanish Colonial Revival home in a canyon just below the Pacific Palisades for more than 30 years. There, they raised their two children, Annie, 38, and Ruby, 29. Curtis says the “single greatest thought I may have when I’m dying is that my children both wanted to be married at our home. In one case, they wanted me to officiate their wedding. I look at that and think, Well, that’s something really special.”

Curtis lives a life of constant curiosity. “I am more alive today than I was when I was 37 years old. Or 47. Or 57. Way more alive,” she says.

Andrew Eccles

The home is surrounded by a yard shaded by several huge live oaks. Curtis says that when she and Guest were evacuated in January due to the threat of the Palisades Fire, she was more worried about losing the oaks than anything. In the end, the home suffered only smoke damage, and, since it is undergoing restoration, she and Guest are living in a much smaller house next door, which Curtis has, in the past, used as her production office.

On this morning a few days after her photo shoot, Curtis and I are sitting in that temporary refuge at a glass dining table adjacent to a living room that features a floor-to-­ceiling limestone fireplace. The space is warm but not overly bright; a throw drapes a modular recliner; books are stacked nearby. Curtis’ rescue pup Runi (short for Karuna, which means “compassion” in Sanskrit) and her grand-dog Bella (a yellow Lab rescue that Curtis and Guest are watching while Annie and her husband are away) pad and stretch and nap on the clean, low-pile carpeting under our bare feet (no shoes permitted inside this house).

Guest is also somewhere in the house, Curtis acknowledges with a lowered voice while indicating that, for his sake, she wants to slightly limit our interview time to be respectful of him. “There’s a point when I have to stop the machine a bit,” she says, noting that Guest is less comfortable being in the public eye than she is. When I ask what the secret is to their long marriage, she says, “ ‘Forever.’ That’s the term, right? That’s what you’ve vowed to.”

She then reflects and says that the older she gets, the more she realizes how different she and Guest are as individuals. She talks about her independence and her self-­sufficiency, her ability to fasten things with screws and to locate the gas shutoff valve, for example. “But the one thing I cannot do for myself is to make myself laugh,” she says, and she values humor as a lifesaving trait. “I married the funniest dude on the planet. Christopher Guest can drop me to the ground with a look, let alone a phrase. It can be annoying to be married to somebody who can use his humor to disarm any natural rage that you might have, but it’s also an amazing blessing.”

Curtis fits comfortably into the domestic scene surrounding us. She seems more at ease with running a home than any movie or TV star I’ve spoken to in more than 30 years of interviewing celebrities. She still cooks dinner for her husband most nights. A gal who never had any training as a gardener or even a house plant cultivator, she grows beautiful roses — Lagerfelds, which are a gorgeous shade of lavender and not always responsive to the unschooled horticulturist. She also does yoga to maintain balance and flexibility, which she calls “the two cornerstones to aging.”

Curtis looks forward to taking on challenging and complex roles, and she intends to continue producing television and film projects that allow her colleagues to do the same.

Andrew Eccles

She likes the idea of “shedding”: divesting, getting rid of the old. She and Guest were seriously thinking about downsizing to a much smaller home when the California fires erupted, but the practicality, financial and otherwise, of selling their home, buying a new one and starting over led them to decide to stay where they are. Which is not to say Curtis plans to refurnish every room after their house has been “de-smoked.” She plans to keep some of the rooms’ doors closed and “to leave a smaller footprint in that house,” she says, “which is an old idea that we will use as a new idea. I spend my days thinking old idea, new idea, and I want new ideas.”

Luckily, Curtis does not suffer from a lack of energy. She wakes up in those predawn hours and goes, goes, goes, as she always has. That is, until about 4 or 5 p.m., when the sun begins to fade. At about that time, she’ll turn to her husband and make what has become a routine gesture, drawing her hand across her throat, signaling, “I’m tapped out.” She explains, “I don’t know if it’s a childhood trauma, and I don’t really care, but in my opinion nothing good happens at night.” Curtis’ friends all know that she doesn’t do dinner; she does brunch. She says she’d love to see Bruce Springsteen live—“I’d sit there for six freakin’ hours for Bruce!”—but only if he’d start a concert at 1 p.m. She takes “delicious” naps only if work events require her to be out at night. Otherwise, she’s in bed by 8 p.m.

So as we part, I am reminded of a story she told me earlier. She once met someone who told her there were two kinds of people. One wakes up in the morning and says, “Good morning, God.” The other wakes up and says, “Good God, it’s morning!” She says she’s long been the former — all so she can wake up and do it over again.