We all know that Hollywood is a place that values youth above all else, but Jamie Lee Curtis has specific expertise in the matter. The 66-year-old ac
We all know that Hollywood is a place that values youth above all else, but Jamie Lee Curtis has specific expertise in the matter. The 66-year-old actor has seen her fair share of bumps on the road to fame since her 1978 debut in Halloween, but the one-time ingenue was hit hardest by the business’s agism when she watched her celebrated parents’ careers trail off in their later years. But despite her worry that she’d follow in their footsteps, the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh is booking projects left and right—including a much-anticipated reboot of the beloved TV series Murder, She Wrote.
Curtis is currently promoting Freakier Friday, the long-awaited sequel to 2003 body swap comedy Freaky Friday, so if it seems like she and co-star Lindsay Lohan are everywhere these days, you might be right. And that ubiquity might continue for a while, as the Oscar winner tells The Guardian she also has “TV series Scarpetta, survival movie The Lost Bus, four other TV shows and two other movies” in the works.
A project she failed to name might be the biggest one for those obsessed with 1980s TV. Deadline reported behind schedule last year that Jamie Lee Curtis was in talks to star in a film adaptation of Murder, She Wrote, which ran on CBS from 1984 to 1996. According to the publication, Curtis would play Jessica Fletcher, the role last occupied by Angela Lansbury, in a film written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo.
When caught on the red carpet by Entertainment Tonight last week, Curtis appeared to confirm that report, saying “Oh, it’s happening,” when asked about the reboot.
“We’re a minute away, but yeah, [I’m] very excited. Very excited. But I’m tamping down my enthusiasm until we start shooting. I have a couple of other things to hustle, but then I’ll get to enjoy that work.”
And yet, Curtis tells the Guardian, “I have been 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.”
That fear of the age wolf at the door started early, as she watched how things went for her parents. “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 says. “I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that’s very painful.”
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