Jamie Lee Curtis: Please Refrain From Sucking

As the child of a long-divorced pair of reigning '50s glamour-pusses, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Curtis has surely gleaned survival lessons from the careers of her parents and their peers. Her mother, who has not done a feature since working with Curtis in The Fog, once told me she would have loved to have teamed with Curtis in the movie version of Carrie Fisher's Hollywood mother and daughter saga, Postcards From the Edge.

"Obviously, we would have brought some real baggage to it," Curtis concedes. "But it's too manipulative to assume that just because you're a child of stars, you should want to act with them, I admire the work of both my parents, but if the work we might do together weren't organic, if it were some sort of forced thing, forget it. If I were doing a TV series and the writers came up with great roles for both of them, fine, But to play parent and child in a movie?" She shakes her head, no. "Besides, I never took back on a movie project and go, 'If only...' especially on Postcards, because Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep were so fabulous and it was a very funny, smart, sad movie."

Does Curtis ever ponder whether she'd have cut it in the age of movies when her mother and father were mega, when their mere presence at a movie premiere was sufficient to cause a stampede? Again, she shakes her head in the negative. "My mother, because of the times in which she lived and starred, had more to hide than I do," she says. "People nowadays can be more forthcoming than my mother was allowed to be. There was a veneer requirement back then that I don't have to abide by. She worked in a very protected time, a lime in which you were saved by the studio, by publicity, from yourself a lot. In some ways it was good, but it also bred problems for all stars, because they had to hide who they really were, and the way they repressed their tendencies was usually through alcohol abuse. Having the protection and nurture of the studio must have given people a feeling of belonging, whereas today, when you're a freelance actor, you cannot survive that without developing a very tough skin. You cannot be guileless and survive today."

Careerwise, Curtis says she has learned from her parents to be a generalist, rather than it specialist. "My mother came with me when I was up for a Screen Actors Guild award for True Lies, and Quentin Tarantino was at our table." she recalls. "He told my mother, 'Your work with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and all those comedies you did is a fucking study of great comic acting. You were the most underrated comedienne in the movies.' She beamed and he was correct, because while people dismissed some of that work as fluff, she could deliver great comic timing and then, without missing a beat, do Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate. My father? Same thing. He did wacky sex farces as well as Sweet Smell of Success and The Boston Strangler. They both could play broad or subtle, they did movies, a play, TV, and most of it went unheralded. In many ways, I've followed them without ever having a conscious thought about it. I've ventured into areas that a lot of other actors haven't and I've emerged fairly unscathed."

Chances are good that Curtis may again emerge unscathed from her next two projects, both romps, House Arrest and Fierce Creatures. I tell her how funny I think she can be on screen, particularly when playing a bottled-up, frantic type completely at odds with her sensuous body. Although she makes appreciative noises, she puts it down to the fact that she has "carefully chosen whom I'm opposite. My success, on screen and off, has been married to being with people who are very funny, so that I can just relax. I always say, "Let's go to the people who don't get offered things. Let's find the guy who has never been a leading man before.' Although my work is fine in the Mel Gibson movie I did, Forever Young, I've always felt more comfortable with sort of 'outsider' people who aren't, by trade, leading men. Eddie Murphy. Dan Aykroyd, John Cleese. Richard Lewis--those are four funny men. Whip funny. If I had to deliver the laughs on [the TV series] 'Anything But Love,' there wouldn't have been a show. I'm not funny like Mary Tyler Moore or Cybill Shepherd--you don't hang jokes on me. I can give the director a laugh where he's not expecting one, like in True Lies where the script says, 'she dances clumsily,' and I did that little Skate, Shing-A-Ling thing, so that the director goes, 'How nice, she gave us a laugh where we didn't have one.' But given a funny line of dialogue, I rarely deliver it well."

Oh, come on, what about when she puts down Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda with: "To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people ... I've worn dresses with higher IQs!"? Damn funny and well-delivered, I'd say. "Look at it again," she urges. "I'm laughing in that scene. We reshot it on the last day, because I had fucked up so badly that I begged John Cleese, 'Please, it's the only funny scene I have in the movie. I needed to kick it and I failed you.' We reshot, but I was laughing, and that was the best take."

Will audiences be laughing with Fierce Creatures, which reassembles the Wanda gang in a completely unrelated tale of an Australian publishing empire doing a hostile takeover of a London zoo they plan to turn into a golf course? Although she declares the movie "good," she says, "We're gonna reshoot some, just as we did [on Wanda]. John is very structural. With his work, you have to shoot his structure, then examine that and go back and restructure. Woody Allen is famous for going back and redoing things in that way. Where the first film was a clash of cultures, Fierce Creatures is a clash of values, of profit and greed versus conservation and animal love. Both scripts are very smart, funny and concise, and it's the performances that make the movies. I play a bizarre character, but I don't think I have a laugh in the whole movie."

On the other hand, Curtis had nothing but laughs playing the nagging wife of Kevin Pollak in House Arrest. Will paying audiences actually go for the flick's premise, in which bickering parents are held hostage by their kids until they sort out their marital disarray? It sounds a bit like Irreconcilable Differences meets The Ref--both funny, neither one a box-office hit. "I always thought it was a very clever premise, but I didn't know if the execution, the coming together of all the variables, would work," Curtis comments. "It's come together delightfully and I feel strongly that it will have success."

When I suggest we cut loose and get seriously back to play, Curtis jumps at the chance. Which of her costars has she most enjoyed getting into a lip-lock? "Kissing has been one of the great perks of my career," she says. "Dan Aykroyd will go down in the history of my small, inconsequential but fun film career as an amazingly sensitive, affectionate, warm, funny, smart man. And he can kiss. We had a great kiss at the end of Trading Places, and we could kiss then with a freedom I certainly wouldn't enter into now, because he's married and I'm married. A great kisser and a delicious man."

What would she choose as her one key, life-changing musical theme song? "I remember dating, at 22, a man who was 10 years older who told me that Bruce Springsteen's 'Jungleland' was a transformation for him. He asked me if I had a similar experience. Now, would I like it that my life changed after hearing Bob Dylan? Yeah. Did hearing Bob Dylan change my life? No. It's a terrifying thing to say, but songs that changed my life would be more like 'The Partridge Family' theme song or the Archies' 'Sugar, Sugar,' which, whether I like it or not, is the song of my generation, right alongside 'Build Me Up, Buttercup.'" Curtis and I take a quick interview break to duet on the latter tune, to which we both know all the lyrics. Now that's scary.

As a Hollywood baby, what advice would she dole out to young movie and TV hopefuls arriving on trains, planes and busses? "Turn around and go back now," she snaps. What's the one thing a girl in this town should never be caught without? "A condom," she replies. What's one thing that someone in this business better take care he doesn't lose? "His soul." How about hearing Curtis confess one of her guiltier pleasures? "Awards shows," she fires back. "My friend Lisa Birnbach and I have an open line from New York to Los Angeles during every awards show ever known to man. They absolutely unleash my venom. I become the meanest person on the planet. Here it is, the biggest night of the year and these people come out like somnambulists. They're so aware of themselves, I just want to gag and smack them, I'm like, 'Hey, there are a billion people watching, could you just turn on a little fucking charm? It's not a cure for AIDS, you're just out there giving a screenplay award.'"

With that, Curtis must shove off. After all, she's anxious to make good on her decision to take a year's hiatus, starting right now. So, as we prepare to move on, one last question. Say her nine-year-old daughter were, decades from now, to run across an assessment of her mother's film career. What would Curtis hope it says? "That I tried to do things I never thought in my lifetime I would be able to do. That I never analyzed it. And most of all, that I refrained from sucking."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Edward Furlong for the March '96 Movieline.

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