Opinion | How Jamie Lee Curtis changed the say I see the world — and myself

When I was 12 years old, I was obsessed with horror movies and the badass women who starred in them. Rewinding back to the early 2000s, I spent thousands of my childhood hours sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor with my eyes glued to my tiny 23-inch CRT TV, watching my favourite shows and movies.

I loved getting lost in the stories, seeing the crazy special effects from the 1970s and 1980s horror, and wanted to grow up to be like these actresses who spent their days screaming their lungs out while covered in dyed corn syrup.

I also read a lot of magazines. Every weekend I joined my mother in grocery shopping only because I hoped she would buy me the latest issue — or four — that hit the racks. I was an only child and she almost always agreed to buy me whatever I wanted.

When the sliding doors at the front of the grocery store parted, I abandoned my mom at the carts and made a dash for the magazine rack: it towered over me and covered almost an entire wall. I searched for new issues of J-14, Teen People, Seventeen and Entertainment Weekly, which I would share with my best friend Kylie as we waited for our moms to pick us up from our babysitter.

On this day, my eyes landed on a magazine I’d never read before called More. The cover featured my favourite actress, Jamie Lee Curtis. A flash of excitement hit my heart as I grabbed it off the rack. The headline read: “Think I’m perfect? Check me out. Jamie Lee takes off her clothes.”

I flipped to the article and couldn’t believe what I was seeing: this perfect movie star whom Hollywood nicknamed “The Body,” standing in her underwear, with muffin top pouring over her waistband.

Admittedly, I’d already seen more of Curtis’s skin than might be considered appropriate for my age — she’d been topless in “Trading Places.” Yet, the photo I was looking at was a stark contrast to the way I’d seen her in the movies. Here, she looked more like my mom than the bombshell who fought off murderers and dangled off helicopters.

I knew I had to get my mom to not only buy this for me, but to read it herself. She needed to see this. She was the one who introduced me to Jamie Lee Curtis after all.

For as long as I could remember, my mother struggled with her weight. She battled her biology to fit into an unattainable beauty standard perpetuated by the movies, television shows and magazines that entertained her. I watched her torture herself with fad diets she’d seen in commercials, counting calories and weighing slim portions of meat on a tiny, expensive scale while my father and I gobbled cheeseburgers with Vernors ginger ale.

On one particular program, she had to go for weekly injections, which she hated because, as she told me, “a vitamin shot in my ass is painful.” Once, after her nightly bath, she showed me the golf ball-sized bruise that had pooled under her skin where I imagined a massive needle made contact. The bruise was black and green all over and sent a shiver up my spine. In my eyes, she was paying someone to help her harm herself.

On the other hand, I was four inches taller than my mother and, no matter how many Fruit Roll-Ups I stuffed into my face, I stayed skinny. Mom would comment on how lucky I was to be beautiful and she wished she had a waist like mine.

I owe my horror-obsessed childhood to my mother. She kept her first edition Stephen King novels under lock and key in an antique cabinet beside our living room television. When VHS tapes became affordable, she collected her favourite horror movies and wasted no time in beginning my cinematic education. The first three films she showed me were “Hellraiser 5: Inferno,” “Halloween” and “The Fog.” My mother didn’t worry about being age-appropriate; she showed me any movie I wanted as long as we watched it together.

At some point between my first viewings of “Halloween” and “Prom Night,” Jamie Lee Curtis became my favourite actress. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up. The more of her films I watched, the more I believed this meant I would have to stay small and torture myself — like my mother did — for people to like me.

I convinced my mother to buy me the More magazine and we read Curtis’s article together. She brought it with her to work that week and showed it to every woman she could because she was in awe that unretouched cellulite was published in a magazine.

I’d like to say that seeing Curtis in all her mom-like lack of glamour broke my own mother’s destructive pattern of behaviour, but it didn’t.

For me, the photo pulled back the veil of Hollywood glamour and planted me in reality. It enabled me to show myself kindness at a time in my young life when my friends and I would compare our bodies to every actress we saw. It was exactly what I needed to see as a girl only a couple of years away from high school.

I admit that when I grew up, I chased my childhood dream (and failed) to become a horror movie actor before building a life for myself as a writer and technician in the Canadian film industry. Now, I am in my 30s and live with the real-life horrors of rheumatoid arthritis and primary ovarian insufficiency. I cannot always control my body but, over the past two decades, that photograph of Curtis has helped me remember to be kind to myself in those distressing times when my illnesses flare up.

While it may have been an act of rebellion in Hollywood, that unretouched photo forever altered my perception of beauty. From then on, any time I saw any actress I looked up to, I questioned if this was how they really looked and why I wanted to look like them, especially if what I was seeing wasn’t real and took a team of people to create.

This reality check acted as a guiding principle as I aged into a world that has increasingly advanced technology to manipulate photos at the click of a button. Ironically, I’ve built a career working in the post-production world of the movie business and, over the past few years, have been asked more and more to digitally remove wrinkles and blemishes from performers. Every time a client makes this request, I think of Curtis’s photo and how it turned my preteen mind upside down in a constructive way.

To this day, Jamie Lee Curtis uses her fame to encourage kindness in a world of growing tension and animosity. I can’t wait to experience more of her positive cultural impacts now that she’s carrying her new title of Oscar-winning Scream Queen.

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