Actress Jamie Lee Curtis on Her Career

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Do you think that older women are being less easily written off now than perhaps in the past? It really does seem that there are a lot of older women getting a lot of good jobs and being very public about it.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS: Yes. There has been a shift. That’s great. There have been a shift, obviously, in roles, but we have a long, long way to go in the technical side of the movies, directors, producers, writers. There have been many new cameramen – camerawomen, excuse me, who have – see how quickly –

AMANPOUR: Yes –

CURTIS: – you say cameraman?

AMANPOUR: – unconscious bias.

CURTIS: Unconscious bias –

AMANPOUR: Yes, so –

CURTIS: There. Right there, it just happened live on television.

AMANPOUR: It did indeed. Look, I said in the lead you are part of Hollywood royalty. You know, your farther was Tony Curtis, you mother, Janet Lee. They have, you know, I mean, dominated films for so, so long. But, you know, I guess I ask you that because with the #metoo movement, I just want to know whether that protected you from being taken advantage of or from being aggressed or harassed in any way. You were also married through lots of your career as an actress. Did you feel that – or did you have, you know, horrible experiences?

CURTIS: I don’t know a women in showoff business who hasn’t had a horrible experience, and I am one who has. My experiences were when I was much younger, and I’ve been very fortunate. I was – you know, I can’t say that I was sexually assaulted, but I definitely had the oppression of the power and some feeling of needing to succumb to that power.

AMANPOUR: And you had another thing that you had to deal with and you kept it quiet, and for some miraculous reason, nobody understood or figured it out that there you were turning up for movies and this and that and you had a long, long time opioid addiction. How did that start –

CURTIS: Yes.

AMANPOUR: – and how did you kick it?

CURTIS: So I had a small plastic surgery procedure and I was prescribed pain killers which really stimulated an ongoing addiction to them for a very long time. I will say that it was a very controlled addiction in the sense that I was able to somehow compartmentalize it. Obviously I was not high at work. My work you can’t really be high when you do your job very similar to yours. And so, it was a very private addiction, but more than an addiction,