Jamie Lee Curtis spoke out about her regrets over getting plastic surgery in her 20s — as well as revealing that she went under the knife after a cinematographer criticized her appearance on a movie set.
Speaking on 60 Minutes on Monday, May 12, the 66-year-old actress said she felt humiliated by the harsh words she heard at the age of 25, on the set of her 1985 film, Perfect.
“He was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not shooting her today. Her eyes are baggy,’” she recalled. “And I was 25, so for him to say that, it was very embarrassing. So as soon as the movie finished, I ended up having some plastic surgery.”
She added that the surgery did not go particularly well. “That’s just not what you want to do when you’re 25 or 26,” she said. “And I regretted it immediately and have kind of sort of regretted it since.”
In more recent years, the award-winning actress has become a huge supporter of natural beauty, and is hoping more women will follow her lead. “I’ve become a really public advocate to say to women ‘You’re gorgeous and you’re perfect the way you are’,” she said. “So yeah, it was not a good thing for me to do.”
For Curtis, her regrets aren’t just about the results of the surgery, but the dependency on painkillers that they caused. “I became very enamored with the warm bath of an opiate,” she revealed. “I was very quiet, very private about it, but it became a dependency for sure.” The actress has since been sober for more than two decades.
In 2021, Curtis spoke to Fast Company about her horror at the 21st century obsession with surgery and ‘tweakments’. “The current trend of fillers and procedures, and this obsession with filtering, and the things that we do to adjust our appearance on Zoom are wiping out generations of beauty,” she said. “Once you mess with your face, you can’t get it back.”
In November 2024, she shared a makeup-free selfie on social media, and said she had been inspired by another later-in-life advocate of natural beauty, Pamela Anderson.
She also told the “People in the ‘90s” podcast in 2021 that seeing her own parents — Hollywood superstars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh — get face lifts and neck lifts had highlighted the movie industry’s issues with ageing. “I watched their work diminish, I watched their fame not diminish,” she said. “And the contradiction of a lot of fame, but not a lot of work, is really hard to navigate for people. For the rest of your life, you’re famous for something you did a long time ago, and you chase that attention.”
Thankfully, Curtis’s own career seems to be soaring in her 60s, with the actress picking up nominations in the 2024 SAG and BAFTA Awards for her role in The Last Showgirl, and her forthcoming Freaky Friday reboot with Lindsay Lohan attracting huge attention ahead of its August release.
