The song that always makes Jamie Lee Curtis cry: “Every time I hear it”
There can’t be many actors who can genuinely claim to have made a great movie in each of six consecutive decades, but Jamie Lee Curtis definitely can – and she’s done it in several different genres too.
Although she can lay claim to being one of the earliest examples of a nepo baby, getting a fine start in life courtesy of being born to screen icons Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, she showed genuine talent right from the start of her career when she made a big screen bow in John Carpenter’s seminal slasher Halloween in 1978. That movie went down as one of the finest of all time and established her as one to watch.
She followed it up with a couple more horror movies, but to avoid being typecast, took on a scene-stealing role as a sassy working girl in the brilliant Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd comedy Trading Places in a performance she picked up a Bafta for the following year.
Into the 1990s and Lee Curtis was a revelation in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies, which included one of the finest examples of dancing committed to celluloid and got her a Golden Globe, then in the first decade of the 2000s she showed she could do kid comedy better than anyone with Freaky Friday opposite Lindsay Lohan, a movie which recently spawned a sequel that reunited the actors and earned her another nomination.
Then, in 2019, she appeared in Knives Out, the razor-sharp whodunnit with an ensemble cast that brought in over $300m at the box office, but perhaps she saved the best for last, picking up the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ award at the Oscars for her astonishing performance in the head-spinning 2023 kung-fu time-travel mash-up Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Quite a body of work, then, and you can add to it her own album, which she released a few years back. While not an album of music it was spoken word for children and again earned her an award.
Curtis does have a considerable connection to music, however – she is married to none other than Spinal Tap’s Christopher Guest, for one thing, but has also spoken of her love for ‘70s singers like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. It is Taylor who sings one of her favourite songs of all time, the delicate ‘Millworker’, originally written for a Broadway musical named Working.
Recorded in 1979, the song appeared on Taylor’s album Flag and was penned from the perspective of a female unionised worker left alone with her children after the death of her alcoholic husband.
Revealing her love of the song, Curtis told radio station KCRW: “It was my beginning to understand the possibility of telling a complete story. In one song, he tells this incredibly moving story. It makes me cry every single time I hear it, because more and more people are trying to source out where something comes from: their food, the clothes they wear, even the art they see or the books they read. We have become inured to any sense of authenticity, and here’s a story about a woman who works in a mill.”
In the years since its release, ‘Millworker’ has been covered by the likes of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Bette Midler and Emmylou Harris and Curtis, who identify closely with the lyrics.
She added, “There’s a line in it where she says, ‘I’m never going to meet the man whose name is on the label. It’s just me and my machine.’ And this woman from the moment she sat down to that mill to the day she dies is going to be in front of that machine.”
