Cordial but curiously guarded and seemingly tense, Jamie Lee Curtis welcomes a photographer to her Chicago hotel suite, then requests that he shoot quickly and move on.
”No, it`s not wrinkles I`m worried about,” she earnestly protests in response to some gentle kidding. ”I actually think wrinkles are great. They`re signs of experience and maturity and life. It`s just that I can`t concentrate on doing two things at a time-being interviewed and being photographed.”
Despite her undeniable sexual appeal, which has reduced male moviegoers to tofu or whatever, Curtis herself has often dismissed her offbeat appearance. ”Everything`s a little crooked,” she once remarked. ”I feel like I came out of my Mom sliding into second.”
”I don`t think I`ve ever traded on my looks-used them to get forward in my career,” she says now. ”You know, I find it amusing that people find my face interesting. I think it`s interesting, but I certainly don`t think it`s a BEW-tee-ful one.”
Before the lady doth protest too much, she is shifted to a discussion of her latest film, ”Blue Steel,” a violent police thriller that opened in Chicago and nationwide on Friday. It offers her up as a New York City rookie cop who becomes romantically involved with a Wall Street commodities broker
(Ron Silver) who turns out to be a serial killer, and, through a bizarre turn of events, she winds up being suspended from the force.
”The role of Megan Turner is very physical and not glamorous at all,”
says director Kathryn Bigelow, who wrote the script with Eric Red (”The Hitcher”). ”I needed the audience to believe this woman was a cop. Jamie Lee is incredibly beautiful, but her beauty is very accessible. She`s also very smart, and has the ability to impart a kind of truth in everything she does.” Curtis says that she found the script to be ”interesting,” in contrast to most of the ”mediocre” stuff she is offered these days. ”I thought the cop genre needed to be shaken up a bit, which is one of the reasons I accepted it. This took the police thriller and twisted it, chewed it up and spit it out. I was particularly intrigued by the director. When we took (sic) a meeting, I was sort of amazed that this attractive woman could handle this kind of material.”
The plot hinges on the refusal of the rookie`s colleagues to believe her story that such an upstanding member of the community is actually the raging psychopath who scratches Megan`s name on his .44 Magnum bullets and bathes his body in the blood of his victims. ”The story really is the system,” the actress says. ”One of the things I learned about being a police officer is that they`re constantly waiting for what you did wrong; they`re never praising you for what you did right. This happens particularly in America, where we`re constantly looking for what the police did wrong, so the bad guys can get off.”
No question, ”Blue Steel” is a very violent film. Asked about possible reservations about signing on, Curtis proceeds to turn it into a discourse on the Bill of Rights.
”My belief is that I`m an actor, and it is a free country. Certainly, I think we should all draw our own personal moral lines which we will not cross. But I respect any filmmaker`s right to make whatever entertainment they choose. There is a huge audience for this type of screen-violence film. I don`t advocate violence. I`m not a violent person on any level. But at the same time, I didn`t feel this crossed my line of morality. `Blue Steel` is a cop thriller. Good guys and bad guys. It didn`t seem unacceptable to me. You know, I really think that if a man were in this role, the question wouldn`t even be asked. I seriously doubt if anyone asks Clint Eastwood if he has problems with violence in his films.”
Throughout her film career, Curtis has resisted being plugged into a convenient category. As befits the daughter of Janet (”Pyscho”) Leigh and Tony (”The Boston Strangler”) Curtis, she made her feature film debut in 1978 in John Carpenter`s low-budget, enormously successful horror film
”Halloween,” and went on to become typecast as the ”Scream Queen” with the likes of ”Terror Train” and ”The Fog.”
Trying to break the mold, she showed up in a made-for-TV movie, ”Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratton Story,” playing the Playboy Playmate gunned down by her husband, then progressed to such roles as the good-hearted prostitute in ”Trading Places,” the radio station program director who takes up with a married photographer in ”Love Letters” and the sensual aerobics instructor in ”Perfect.”
In the last couple of years, her roles have greatly varied, as has the success of the films. The biggest hit was ”A Fish Called Wanda,” in which she played a tough-talking, double-crossing jewel thief with an erotic weakness for foreign languages. In ”Amazing Grace and Chuck,” an anti-nuclear fable, she was the business manager of a professional basketball star who, following the lead of a Little League pitcher in Montana, gives up participating in his sport to protest the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Although receiving some rave notices-as well as disastrous ones-it received only a limited distribution. (Says Curtis, not surprisingly: ”It was ahead of its time.”)
Indeed, whatever the role, she is fiercely defensive of the outcome. In the smarmy ”Dominick and Eugene” (1988) for instance, she plays the girlfriend of a fellow medical school student (Ray Liotta) who is being supported-this is not being made up-by his brain-damaged-through-child-abuse twin brother (Tom Hulce) who works on a garbage truck. Her only disappointment with the film, she asserts, is that a couple of her scenes were cut.
Along with her film work, she has been appearing on primetime television these last two seasons in the situation comedy ”Anything But Love” (8:30 p.m. Wednesdays on ABC-Ch. 7), in which she plays a writer for a Chicago weekly magazine. In the pilot, her character explained that she wanted to be a writer ever since she dressed up on Halloween as Lillian Hellman.
(”Originally, there was a follow-up line. They had my father saying, `Oh, yes, I remember the plastic nose and the candy cigarettes.` But they cut it, because I guess they thought it was derogatory to Miss Hellman. Sure, it was cruel. Comedy is cruel.”)
Playing a fellow writer in the series is Richard Lewis, the stand-up comic who has built a career around his Woody Allen-like neuroses, which are very much evident in his sitcom character.
”In real life, Richard is a very energetic, ambitious, tortured man, who uses what`s going on inside him very well in his work. He`s really a driven man. He`s also one of the dearest, gentlest men I know-a mensch beyond mensch. His menschability quotient is very high.”
Born 31 years ago in Hollywood, Curtis was educated at Beverly Hills High, Choate and, briefly, the University of the Pacific, where, during her freshman year, she auditioned for the lead in TV`s ”Nancy Drew,” didn`t make the cut, but ended up in another series, ”Operation Petticoat.” From there, it was off to ”Halloween” and beyond.
In 1984, she married actor/writer Christoper Guest (”This Is Spinal Tap”) after seeing his photograph in Rolling Stone and deciding this was the guy for her. The couple has a 3-year-old daughter, Annie.
Throughout her career, she has been nagged by the question of what it was like being the daughter of two famous film stars of the `50s and `60s. (Leigh and Curtis were divorced when Jamie Lee was 3; her stepfather is a stockbroker.) Now, warily sitting in Chicago, she adds one more nagger to her list.
”At times it`s been baggage, at times it`s been a blessing,” she says in a tone that comes up somewhere between a shrug and a sigh. ”Most of the time, I`ve just been proud of being their kid, and I think they`re proud of me. I`ve never traded on their name. Yet to not be proud of them is silly, because they both achieved a lot, coming from very meager backgrounds. One thing is, I don`t think they`ve been given proper credit lately. Everyone is touting all the people from their generation, and I think both of them have been overlooked. . . .I think their time is due.”
All right, here it comes: Although critics have praised Jamie Lee Curtis` ability, in the minds of many moviegoers, she is best identified, of course, with that scene in ”Trading Places” in which she takes off her shirt.
A tight smile, another shrug. ”My breasts are beautiful, and I gotta tell you, they`ve gotten a lot of attention for what is relatively short screen time. I make no excuses and have no regrets for my past work in films. I`m very proud of the work I did in `Trading Places.` And if my breasts have become the topic of dinner conversation at frat houses, God bless `em.”
