Jamie Lee Curtis said she’s been slowly planning her retirement from Hollywood after watching her famous parents get “rejected” from the industry as they aged.
During a recent interview with The Guardian, the Oscar winner, daughter of industry icons Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, criticized the way older actors, especially women, are treated in Hollywood.
“I witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age,” the 66-year-old said. “I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that’s very painful.”
While the Freakier Friday actress has starred in dozens of projects throughout her career, she admitted that she’s always been one step ahead and actually “self-retiring for 30 years.”
“I have been prepping to get out, so that I don’t have to suffer the same as my family did. I want to leave the party before I’m no longer invited,” she added.
Curtis most recently reprised her role as Tess Coleman in the upcoming Freaky Friday sequel, opposite Lindsay Lohan, though now she’s playing a grandmother. While the actress loved being able to revisit that story, bringing it to a new generation, it didn’t come without its own challenges. Curtis also told The Guardian that she found her conventional aesthetic look in Freakier Friday, where she “had to look pretty, I had to pay attention to [flattering] lighting, and clothes and hair and makeup and nails,” harder than her role as a messy alcoholic in The Bear.
Over the years, the Everything Everywhere All at Once star has always spoken highly about the “beautiful gift of aging,” despite the negative light Hollywood casts on getting older. She told AARP: The Magazine in 2023 that she’s lucky to “continually have had an opportunity to expand.”
“I’m talking about expanding intellectually,” she added at the time. “I’m an autodidact and an opsimath — a late-in-life learner. I feel very fortunate that I’m having more creative opportunities — I’m getting to do what I’ve wanted to do since I was a teen. I’m starting to produce and direct things.”