Golden Globe winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis isn't afraid to get real. She went au naturel on the cover of AARP The Magazine— but wants to set the record straight. "Isn't it fascinating that this constitutes being naked?" Jamie says. "In my world, this is called strapless."
Jamie says there was a deeper message behind the cover. "The idea was, it's shedding skin. And I think that's where the misnomer came from because the idea of shedding skin is peeling away the layers," she says. "Peeling the layers away to get to that beautiful essence. The more you peel away, the stronger the scent—the stronger the message, the mind."
With her natural grey hair and pared-down wardrobe, some may say Jamie is glamming down—but she doesn't see it that way.
"I never represented glam," she says. "That's the thing, you'll never see me in the front row of a fashion show. I'm uninterested in it. I find it trivial and banal and boring. I find it to be the least interesting thing that a woman can pay attention to, is clothing. I'm so much more interested in what's going on in the world today and what we're thinking and how we're feeling. And so for me, I think glamming down is really diminishing what I'm talking about, which is really paring down the sort of detritus of my life."
Jamie says she is trying to portray a truthful image of herself, both in life and on the cover of AARP The Magazine. "I believe that life is hard," she says. "That we all are going to walk through things that are hard and challenging, and yet advertising wants us to believe that it's all easy. Everything's easy—aging's easy, childrearing's easy, dressing's easy—everything's easy. And I think it's a real disservice to people because I think it feeds you something that's not true."
While Jamie says she finds nothing wrong with corrective surgery, she thinks cosmetic surgery is a shortcut that doesn't fix the problem—and she knows from experience. Jamie says she has had cosmetic surgery on her lower eyelids as well as liposuction. "The fraud is, it doesn't work. It doesn't work because there are complications, and I got them all. It doesn't work because you still look in the mirror and you see the fraud of what you were trying to do."
To celebrate her 50th birthday this year, Jamie is foregoing the late-night partying for a birthday breakfast. It makes perfect sense, since Jamie says she likes to be in bed by 8 p.m. "I'm like a farmer in that way," she jokes. "Breakfast has always been my favorite meal, and I thought, 'I'm going to make all my friends get up early and come over about 8 in the morning with their kids. I'll have a carnival scene, and kids can make their hands in wax and have breakfast, and everybody will be gone by 11:30.'"
Although it's her birthday, Jamie says she is planning on being the gift-giver. "I'm making beautiful books of photographs as my gift to my friends," she says. Although Jamie's friends tell her she should show her photographs publicly, Jamie says she doesn't need any more attention. "I think for someone who's been this public eye her whole life, trying to sort of evolve in public, really, it's kind of a weird thing to do."
Although she gets to show her creative side as an actor, Jamie says it was becoming an author that really made her feel like an artist. "My experience is that it was the only true artistic voice I've ever done because it came from me and I had no expectation," she says. "I love the idea that something came from my mind. It was my idea. It lived and grew right in here."
More than 5 million copies of her children's books have been sold, and Jamie isn't planning to stop writing anytime soon. Her next book Big Words for Little People comes out in September 2008. Jamie says her new book will examine language. "Words [like] consequences, respect, responsibility, appropriate, inappropriate—these are words that I want little people to understand so, when they grow up, they can make better choices as the big people."
