Curtis: Not afraid of 50
(AP Photo/Lisa Rose)
Curtis’ new skin
Jamie Lee Curtis isn’t grieving the loss of her youth, says Nancy Griffin in AARP. “I have not one second of anxiety about turning 50,” Curtis says of her upcoming birthday. “I feel way better now than I did when I was 20. I’m stronger, I’m smarter, I’m so much less crazy than I was then.” As she’s aged, she says, she’s given up all artifice. “Getting older means paring yourself down to an essential version of yourself—nothing extraneous. Trying to shed skins and shed ideas. I’ve etched out who I am through myriad haircut attempts, beauty attempts, diet attempts. It’s been an evolution. I’ve let my hair go gray; I wear only black and white. The same way that midcentury modern architecture was in the ’50s, I want to be as a human being. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines.” Curtis began to appreciate the beauty of simplicity some years ago, when she and her husband, writer Christopher Guest, went to the Golden Globe Awards. “I was wearing some borrowed dress that wasn’t me, my hair was done in a way that I never wear, and I had earrings on. And my husband said, ‘You know who is the most beautiful woman in the room?’ I was hoping he was going to say me. But he pointed at Jessica Tandy. She was wearing a cream-colored silk-shantung pantsuit. Single strand of pearls, short white hair, a little lipstick—nothing else. And I thought, He’s totally right. There was none of the pretense, none of the trying so hard.”
