Jamie Lee Curtis has been preparing to leave Hollywood for decades.
“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,” Curtis, 66, told The Guardian in an interview published on Saturday, July 26.
“I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone,” she continued. “And that’s very painful.
As a result of her parent’s difficult experience in an industry notorious for ageism, Curtis admitted that she has been low-key “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,” she added. “I want to leave the party before I’m no longer invited.”
Curtis — who kicked off her lucrative Hollywood career at the tender age of 19 in the iconic slasher film Halloween — has spoken openly and often about society’s apparent ire towards women of a certain age.
“This word ‘anti-aging’ has to be struck,” the actress said while attending the 2022 Radically Reframing Aging Summit, hosted by Maria Shriver. “I am pro-aging. I want to age with intelligence, and grace, and dignity, and verve and energy.”
She added, “I don’t want to hide from it.”
Jamie Lee Curtis Agustin Cuevas/Getty Images for Disney
At the same Summit, Curtis shared how she has learned to accept her body. (She had previously admitted to having a cosmetic procedure at age 25 after someone made a comment on set about her “baggy” eyes.)
“I’m not denying what I look like, of course I’ve seen what I look like,” she said at the time, per Today.com. “I am trying to live in acceptance. If I look in the mirror, it’s harder for me to be in acceptance. I’m more critical. Whereas, if I just don’t look, I’m not so worried about it.”
The scream queen! Jamie Lee Curtis has had a long and successful career, starting off in iconic horror films before venturing into hit comedies. The Fierce Creatures actress was born in Santa Monica, California, to actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Jamie went on to study law at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, […]
In March of that same year, while promoting her award-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which earned the actress her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Deirdre Beaubeirdre, Curtis also touched on society’s lasting ageism.
“In the world, there is an industry — a billion-dollar, trillion-dollar industry — about hiding things. Concealers. Body-shapers. Fillers. Procedures. Clothing. Hair accessories. Hair products,” she wrote via Instagram at the time. “Everything to conceal the reality of who we are. And my instruction to everybody was: I want there to be no concealing of anything. I’ve been sucking my stomach in since I was 11, when you start being conscious of boys and bodies, and the jeans are super tight. I very specifically decided to relinquish and release every muscle I had that I used to clench and hide the reality. That was my goal. I have never felt more free creatively or physically.”
