Jamie Lee Curtis says she has been “self-retiring” for 30 years

We here at JoBlo love us some Jamie Lee Curtis. Yes, she’s a horror icon but she has done and accomplished so much more than she ever gets full credit for. But now that she is in her mid-60s, she is reflecting on how much time she truly has left in the industry, especially considering how her famous parents were treated.

As Jamie Lee Curtis told The Guardian, she recognizes that Hollywood can be ageist, saying, “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.” Even as she helps promote next month’s sequel Freakier Friday, she remembered that she “had to look pretty, I had to pay attention to [flattering] lighting, and clothes and hair and makeup and nails.”

But, again, it all comes back to the parents of Jamie Lee Curtis: Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, two of the most iconic actors of their time. As she put it, “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. I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that’s very painful.” While Janet Leigh would work into the early 2000s – a good 50+ years in the business, including one of her final roles, a clever cameo opposite daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in 1998’s Halloween H20 – and Tony Curtis stuck around for a few more years, you’d be hard pressed to name a truly memorable part for them in their late careers.

However, we all have to recognize that Jamie Lee Curtis has done something that neither of her Oscar-nominated parents has done – no, it’s not just winning the Academy Award (which JLC did for Everything Everywhere All at Once, though Leigh and Curtis would be nominated for Psycho and The Defiant Ones, respectively): she has proven a vital figure in both film and television even into her 60s. And we truly don’t want to lose her – fortunately, it seems like we aren’t even close to that, as JLC has confirmed that she is leading the Murder, She Wrote reboot movie.

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