Beloved Actress Says She’s Been ‘Self-Retiring’ From Hollywood

Jamie Lee Curtis is opening up about “self-retiring” from Hollywood as she calls out the entertainment industry’s attitude toward aging.

The Academy Award-winning actress, 66, opened up to The Guardian ahead of the release of Disney’s Freakier Friday on Aug. 8, revealing that watching parents Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis be cast aside by Hollywood in their older years changed her mindset about her career.

“I witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age,” she told the outlet. “I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that’s very painful.”

Because of this, Curtis explained, “I have been self-retiring for 30 years. I have been prepping to get out, so that I don’t have to suffer the same as my family did. I want to leave the party before I’m no longer invited.”

The Halloween actress also called out the “genocide” of a generation of women who have “disfigured themselves” at the hands of the “cosmeceutical industrial complex.”

“I’ve used that word [genocide] for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word,” Curtis said. “I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers — there’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances. And it is aided and abetted by AI, because now the filter face is what people want.”

“I’m not filtered right now. The minute I lay a filter on and you see the before and after, it’s hard not to go: ‘Oh, well that looks better,’” she continued. “But what’s better? Better is fake. And there are too many examples — I will not name them — but very recently we have had a big onslaught through media, many of those people.”

Back in May, Curtis revealed on 60 Minutes that she underwent plastic surgery at age 25 after receiving a comment about her “baggy” eyes on the set of her film Perfect, which she regretted “immediately.”

“I’ve become a really public advocate to say to women: ‘You’re gorgeous and you’re perfect the way you are.’” she said at the time. “It was not a good thing for me to do.”