Jamie Lee Curtis wouldn’t have expected her mother’s approval after winning her first Oscar.
Curtis, 67, reflected on what she thought her late actress mother, Janet Leigh, would have felt about her 2023 Best Supporting Actress win for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once on Wednesday’s episode of Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson’s IMO podcast.
“I can tell you right now, if my mom had been alive during Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, she would not have liked…I mean, I don’t think she would have liked the movie,” Curtis said.
Leigh was a legendary actress best known for starring in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, for which she earned a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination. Curtis said that seeing her daughter play the frumpy IRS auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre would have bucked against her mother’s beauty-centric career.
“I’m not speaking ill of my beautiful mother,” Curtis explained, but “I think that would have challenged every norm. Because in her years as an actress, being an actress meant a facade. Very much about what you looked like and how women were perceived and their bodies.”
“I think my mother would have...It would have been very challenging,” she concluded. Leigh died in 2004 from vasculitis at the age of 77.
Curtis began her movie career at age 19 with 1978’s Halloween, which was her first major role. She later broke out beyond the famous horror franchise and gained recognition for her comedic acting chops before winning her first Oscar at age 64.
Curtis told Obama and Robinson that she credits her mother’s upbringing for keeping her grounded throughout her Hollywood career.
“It was just the way she lived and just the way she interacted with people. I think she never lost that sense that she was, that it was a miracle, that she became Janet Leigh. And that impoverished childhood. She had a lot of sadness in her family life.”
“We grew up, as I said, in a very normalized life,” she explained, “Early bedtimes, and chores, and bikes, and, you know, played outside.” Still, she said, her movie-star mother had notions about how an actress should be that would make her daughter’s career hard to swallow.
“The goal of a parent is to actually separate into separate ideologies, separate physical lives, and hopefully there’s some nice interactions, but people are allowed to have their own minds,” Curtis said.
“Is that my mother’s gift? I don’t know. I don’t know if my mother would love the mind I have.”
