Jamie Lee Curtis: The Life of a Chameleon

First, she had her virginal, teen-scream-queen period. Then, a lusty, expose-your-body, sex-bomb period. Next, she went through a sweet, art house-only phase and most recently, she’s thrived as a wacky comedian. Now, Jamie Lee Curtis is launching her blue period--well, her “Blue Steel” period. And she’s anything but blue.

Sent to photograph her for an article timed to the release of her latest film, “Blue Steel”--a stylized action-packed thriller that culminates in a vicious Old West-style shoot-out between a female cop and a psychopathic serial killer--a photographer presents Curtis with an old picture of the actress, taken in the summer of 1985, just after the demise of the much ballyhooed catastrophe “Perfect.” Her hair is short in this photo, the ends frosted white. Curtis sits alone on a huge couch, most of her body hidden behind cushions. She looks sad. Very sad. And very lonely.

Curtis, circa 1990, the star of ABC’s modestly rated but sassy sitcom “Anything But Love,” treasures the photograph because it reminds her of the emotional land mines that dot Hollywood’s boulevards to fame and fortune--ever ready to explode with each wrong step, each wrong movie made for what Curtis calls “the wrong reasons.” Curtis stands for a moment in the living room of the bright, Southwestern-style home she shares with her husband, Christopher Guest, and their 3-year-old daughter, Annie, soaking up her own image. “God, that was an awful time,” she says. “Such a lonely summer.”

Then, with the same steely resolve and erect athletic posture she employed to portray the brutally relentless heroine in “Blue Steel,” she quickly puts the photo and memories of those sad days away. As she strides upstairs to show off the “shrine” to her career--a room filled with photographs, scripts and clapboards from nearly every film and television project she’s ever done--she’s not quite as perky and optimistic as Hannah Miller, the novice magazine writer she plays on TV. But she’s darn close.

A few years ago, she acknowledges, her current professional predicament might have left her flushed with anxiety. “Blue Steel,” her first-ever solo-starring role and first big-film credit since “Perfect,” hit the theaters just last Friday, and her TV show is far from a lock to make ABC’s fall lineup. In a business powered by box-office tallies and Nielsen points, an actress interested in her future would have every reason to fret a little.

“I used to do that,” Curtis says, fiddling with her naturally brown hair now grown out past her shoulders. “Even last year I had someone wake me up at 6 a.m. to tell me what the overnights (ratings for “Anything But Love”) were from the night before. But I’ve learned that none of that means anything to me. I can’t control that. I’ve had enough experiences with both success and failure to know that I can live with both.”

Curtis, 31, claims that her TV image as a chipper comedian coupled with the “action, heroine soldier figure” of “Blue Steel” couldn’t show off her acting versatility any better. She can do comedy, she can do drama--on TV or on the silver screen. She can shoot a .38 Smith & Wesson like the Sundance Kid, or pour ice cubes down her dress for sitcom-styled laughs. She looks great in a tight, sleeveless frock and she looks pretty good in a baggy police uniform too. And no matter how many times the world at large has tried to pigeonhole her, Curtis and several people she’s worked for recently are confident that her days of fighting restrictive stereotypes are long gone.

“The public has seen her in lots of guises and one of the reasons she did this movie was that she wanted to show other aspects of her talent,” said Edward Pressman, producer of “Blue Steel.” “She is able to carry off a very violent character and at the same time keep her humanity intact.”

“I’ve had several incarnations, haven’t I?” Curtis says. “For five years I was the vulnerable little horror-movie lover. Then I was the slut. Now because of ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ and the TV show I’m sort of the zany comedian. And this movie exploits another image that I always thought would be perfect for me.”

In a film career that began in 1978 with John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” the actress daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh has already had what one writer called “more close escapes than an Indiana Jones movie.” Curtis insists that she never had a career plan nor a deluge of offers that would have afforded her such a luxury. She took each movie part for the job, to earn her own living. Her shrewd career moves, she says, appear shrewd only in retrospect.

She followed “Halloween” with an interminable string of horror flicks that included “Terror Train,” “The Fog,” “Prom Night,” “Road Games” and “Halloween II.” She extricated herself from that genre with the 1981 TV movie “Dorothy Stratten: Death of a Centerfold,” in which she used her body as an acting asset for the first time. Her ample figure was also on display in another string of films--”Love Letters,” “Grandview USA,” “Trading Places” and “Perfect”--trapping her this time as a sex queen who couldn’t make a movie without removing her blouse.

The “Perfect” flop probably saved her from this image, simply because it put a whiplashing halt to her speeding career. That lonely summer, Curtis hibernated a bit, realized the futility of choosing projects because of the boffo expectations that surround them, and decided, she says, “to hide for awhile” in smaller parts in smaller movies.

“ ‘Perfect’ was a very public failure,” Curtis recalls. “And it goes on and on because they come out with the year’s worst lists and they plaster your picture everywhere. It was horrible. At that point I just didn’t want to be in the spotlight.”

Three commendable, “little” films--”A Man in Love,” “Dominick and Eugene” and “Amazing Grace and Chuck”--spotlighted Curtis in only a peripheral way. Next, Curtis proved herself a facile comedian in John Cleese’s “A Fish Called Wanda.” And then the small screen beckoned.

While most television actors--Michael J. Fox, Tom Selleck and Shelley Long to name just a few--exploit their TV popularity to launch a career in film, Curtis, a film actress for just about her entire acting life, chose to try it the other way.

“I had a 9-month-old daughter and I had just had a wonderful, familial experience on ‘Wanda’ and I wanted that same kind of experience again,” Curtis explains. “Films don’t offer that much. You go in, you’re not on anybody’s team. It’s very lonely and a real gypsy lifestyle. I really wanted to have a more cohesive experience and work with the same people for awhile.”

Curtis worked the first five months of 1988 on the initial “Anything But Love” pilot, which featured a love triangle between Curtis, her current co-star Richard Lewis and another man played by D. W. Moffett. But ABC rejected it.

Though “Blue Steel,” a movie chock-full of stylized blood and gore, is not the kind of film Curtis would generally choose to see, she jumped at the chance to play the young woman cop after the TV show apparently fell through because she felt it was time to take responsibility for a film again.

Kathryn Bigelow, the film’s director and co-writer, said she wrote this feminine twist on the action genre with Curtis in mind. “She was my central image, a woman who is incredibly strong yet retains her femininity,” Bigelow said. “(Curtis) has a kind of androgyny to her. She moves beautifully. She’s very comfortable with her body. She’s forthright and she has the ability to impart truth and believability so that the audience can feel comfortable riding her ride.

“And when we were shooting I kept responding to her warmth. With all the tragedy and violence the character faces, I never wanted her to lose her warmth and conviction. I never wanted it to be that grim. And Jamie is absolutely that way. It was an incredibly physical shoot toward the end, but I’d say, ‘cut,’ and this smile would pop on her face. And she enthusiastically would want to do it again, completely undaunted by how physically demanding it was. She’s a soldier.”

Curtis says she was intrigued by this character--a woman in a traditional action, good-guy hero role heretofore almost exclusively occupied by men--and by Bigelow, a painter who has been praised for the stylish, atmospheric visuals of her previous films, “The Loveless” and “Near Dark.” She acknowledges that somebody is bound to castigate her for participating in a violent film and that she won’t allow her daughter to watch the TV ads for it. But Curtis says that she didn’t suffer any moral quandaries in accepting the part.

While on the shoot, Curtis nonetheless tempered the chilling psychosis of this story by fine-tuning her wickedly macabre sense of humor. With some of her fellow “Blue Steel” crew mates, she wrote and performed several caustic songs, set to popular tunes, satirizing the entire experience. And the cover page of her script, which is professionally bound in red leather and saved for posterity in her “shrine,” is shot full of actual bullet holes.

Her disposition brightened further that summer when ABC revived “Anything But Love.” “A Fish Called Wanda” had just been released and Curtis was suddenly quite a hot comic actress. Meanwhile, Richard Lewis’ stand-up career was taking off, and so, Curtis says, ABC decided to capitalize on their popularity. They junked the love triangle, shot six episodes that aired last spring, revamped and recast some of the show again in the summer of 1989, and then went on the air in the fall with this past season’s flood of episodes.

“I really love my job on television,” Curtis enthuses. “I love the challenge and the liberty of playing the same person week to week. I can really get to know her over time. And you’re always dealing with different material. I love trying to get it as good as we can by Friday and then moving on to something else.”

Curtis stops for a second, monitoring her “mother radar” in anticipation of her daughter’s arrival. Her “radar” for knowing what’s going on around her, she says, is her prime acting attribute. “Ask anyone,” she boasts.

“She’s not exactly a great actress but she has great instincts,” said one “anyone” who has watched her work. “She stumbles into good acting because her instincts are correct about 90% of the time.”

“I think it’s her directness and her honesty, that’s her great strength,” said Peter Noah, executive producer of “Anything But Love.” “She has an instinct for what is false and what rings true and she always takes herself to the honest places. That is very appealing to an audience both in a dramatic role or in comedy. I think that’s what gives her such an enormous range.”

“Anything But Love” will go off the air at the end of this month after an entire season of mediocre ratings, and ABC will adjudicate the show’s fate when it announces its fall schedule in May. Curtis hopes to play Hannah Miller for many years to come, but she knows that even one more year is at this point rather iffy.

Her daughter bursts into the room and leaps into Curtis’ lap. “Spell stop for Mommy,” the child’s nanny commands. “S-T-O,” Annie Guest chirps. And then with a little prompting, “P!”

“Almost,” Curtis says. “That’s my baby, she spells stop for me. ‘Spell Stop for Mommy,’ that’s a good title for my autobiography. What do you think? Not bad, huh?”

It’s difficult to imagine this “mommy,” who can also be seen this summer in “Queens Logic” alongside Joe Mantegna and John Malkovich, stopping any time soon. In conversation, she exudes a calm self-assurance, but she can quickly metamorphose into a whirlwind, racing around her house in search of videotapes, playing a quick game of hide-and-go-seek with her child or goofily performing some of her satiric “Blue Steel” songs. She is also, by all accounts, shrewdly ambitious. In a moment of reflection, she predicts that if “Anything But Love” is renewed, she will probably spend the summer relaxing with her family at her second home in the mountains of Idaho. She’s anything but convincing.

“I don’t have a desperate need anymore to be on screen every year,” Curtis says. “I won’t cram a movie into my hiatus just to be on screen. But the buzz is that ‘Blue Steel’ is going to be a hit and so I’ve been swamped with all kinds of weird offers. If I read something I like, maybe. But you’re not going to be able to pin me down just yet.”