Jamie Lee Curtis on playing Laurie Strode in Halloween reboot, facing Michael Myers and #MeToo
- Actress’s debut in John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 slasher horror flick was her defining role, one she has lived with for 40 years
- Curtis’ character faces Michael Myers again – victim finally confronting her tormentor – making it a perfect film for the #MeToo era
Jamie Lee Curtis, instantly recognisable with her immaculately cropped silver hair, has just done a double take. Arriving on the backlot of Universal Studios in Los Angeles, with its vast network of celebrity-named streets, the 59-year-old actress had one of those weird jolts that only comes if you’re Hollywood royalty.
“I just drove by the streets that are named after my parents,” she laughs. “It’s wacky.”
The daughter of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Curtis is every bit as successful as her mother and father. In the 1980s, she went from hit comedies such as Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda to Kathryn Bigelow’s nervy cop thriller Blue Steel.
In the 1990s, she brought charm to the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies and in the noughties scored a huge hit with Freaky Friday opposite Lindsay Lohan.
Yet if there’s one film that defined her, it’s Halloween. John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 slasher horror flick that introduced the world to the masked killer Michael Myers was the film in which Curtis made her debut as the terrorised babysitter Laurie Strode. She returned for the 1981 sequel, Halloween II, and reprised the character for 1998’s Halloween: H20, one of several subsequent attempts to capture the power of the original.