312 months and 9,498 days have passed, in short, 26 years, since Jamie Lee Curtis (66) decided to quit alcohol. 26 years in which the actress has been clean and sober. This is what the star of the Halloween franchise announced on her Instagram account, where she made it clear that since that first recovery meeting, "my life has completely changed. I have made very, very beautiful friendships, which have expanded my life beyond recovery and have given me a family life and a creative life. I never thought it was possible."
Jamie Lee Curtis had just turned 40, been married for 14 years to actor and writer Christopher Guest (77), and had two children, Annie, 12, and Thomas, 2, when she decided to take one of the most important steps of her life. She wanted to end her addiction. As reported by Variety at the time, one night in late 1998, the actress was preparing dinner for her family when she took five Vicodin pills to swallow them all at once with a good glass of wine. A friend of hers saw that scene from afar. Shortly after, the actress stole medication from her sister Kelly's suitcase, which a doctor had prescribed.
The Oscar-winning star for Best Supporting Actress in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) confessed to her sister, who gave her a hug. That gesture triggered a process for Jamie Lee to realize that she had to get out of that hell. Alcohol and painkillers had become her way of life for years.
Additionally, a few months later, in February 1999, she read an article about the effects of Vicodin in Esquire magazine where writer Tom Chiarella talked about his addiction to pills. She found it shocking what the author described: "He wrote that he didn't know where his marriage certificate or his daughter's birth certificate were, but he knew where every Vicodin in his house was."
Curtis felt for the first time that she was not alone. That's when she decided to attend the first recovery meeting at one of the churches in Pacific Palisades, which was recently reduced to ashes due to the devastating California wildfires. A great sorrow for the American actress who wanted to remember those times on Instagram.
Famous since childhood for being the daughter of superstars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, she made her film debut at 20 in Halloween (1978). If one looks at the reports published with her parents when she was a child, it can be seen that Jamie Lee had swollen eyes, giving her a tired look. During a late 80s shoot, a cameraman refused to shoot a scene because her swelling was too noticeable.
Feeling so ashamed, she underwent minor plastic surgery for which she was prescribed Vicodin, a medication containing an opioid used to treat severe pain. As she revealed in Variety, "I was given Vicodin as a painkiller for something that didn't really hurt me." While she was addicted to alcohol and pills, she has confessed repeatedly that she managed it so that it wouldn't affect her work, as she "never took drugs before five in the afternoon and never took painkillers at ten in the morning."
She confirmed this in an interview in 2018 with People: "I spent 10 years stealing, conspiring. Nobody knew. Nobody." This was not the only case in her family, as her father, star of the unforgettable Some Like It Hot (1959) with Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon, had been addicted to everything, especially cocaine, heroin, and freebase, as a way to cope with his constant depressions. There was even a moment when father and daughter took drugs together, but only once, as Jamie Lee has said countless times. It's worth noting that tragedy struck her family when her brother Nicholas died at 21 from an overdose.
In one of her appearances on the Today Show, Jamie Lee stated that "my sobriety has been the key to my freedom, freedom to be myself, not to look in the mirror and try to see someone else. Now I look at myself and see myself, accept myself, and move forward." At 66, the actress has a jam-packed schedule. In the summer, she will premiere Freakier Friday, a sequel to Freaky Friday, and is about to film Ella McCay and The Lost Bus.