Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest’s Relationship Timeline
Actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest’s romance spans over four decades, beginning with Curtis revealing that it was love at first sight.
“I met my husband by seeing his picture in a magazine and saying out loud to a friend of mine, ‘I’m going to marry that dude,’ and married him … months later,” Curtis shared on TODAY in 2021. “So the truth of the matter is life hinged for me on a couple seconds that I didn’t see coming.”
Curtis ended up meeting Guest through a chance meeting in 1984. Initially, a friend gave Curtis Guest’s agent’s phone number. She called him but he never returned her call. But it was Kismet when she bumped into him at a restaurant.
When Jamie Lee Curtis met Christopher Guest …
Curtis recalled that initial meeting with Guest. “He was sitting about 10 feet away and he looked at me and kind of nodded. I made a gesture, like, ‘Hi, I’m the one who called you. I was sitting with Melanie Griffith and Steven Bauer, and I looked down at my plate and whispered, ‘Oh my God, I called this guy and he never called me back and there he is.’ At that moment, Chris got up to leave. He shrugged his shoulders, and basically waved goodbye. Not a word was exchanged,” she told Interview.
But he called her. “He had kept my number. That was June 28, 1984, and I married him four months later, on December 18,” she said.
First came love, then came marriage … then came Annie in 1986
The couple wasted no time starting a family. They adopted their first child, Annie Guest in 1986. They added to their family 10 years later and adopted Ruby Guest, who later came out as transgender.
Today Ruby is 25 and Annie is 34. Annie is a dance instructor and married Jason Wolf in 2019. Ruby married her partner Kynthia in 2022.
Curtis explained why she wrote a children’s book about adoption. “I wanted to write a book about real children and real families joined by adoption … Adopted children often don’t have those kinds of details [about their birth],” she said on Pact’s Point of VIew Newsletter podcast. “‘Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born’ was written to let children who joined their families through adoption know that their own birth stories were exciting, too.”
Christopher Guest and Jamie Lee Curtis collaborated on 2 films
Guest is known for comedies like Best in Show, Little Shop of Horrors, Spinal Tap, and more. The couple didn’t work together until 1992 in Guest’s Return of Spinal Tap. Then later in the 2003 hit film Freaky Friday.
Curtis was actually a last-minute replacement in Freaky Friday when the original actor who was cast in the role of Tess pulled out. But this gave her little to no time to prepare for the role.
“It was a Thursday. They sent me the script, I read it on the plane, I met the director on Saturday, I had my hair dyed red on Sunday, and I was shooting on Monday,” she recalled in a 2019 Vanity Fair video.
Christopher Guest recently encouraged his wife to write her first graphic novel
Most recently, Guest encouraged Curtis to expand her creative horizons and write a graphic novel.
“‘I came home and I said to my husband, ‘I should hire somebody to write Mother Nature.’ He said to me, as Christopher does, very quietly: ‘Why don’t you?’” Curtis shared at the San Diego Comic-Con (via People).
“I said, ‘Oh please, I don’t know how to write a screenplay,’” she said of initially writing the story in the form of a script. “He looked at me, and he said, ‘Yes, you do.’”
She later said, “I’m 65 years old this November, but my point is that I have no time to waste. I joke about it, but I’m going to die way sooner than later, and therefore, I have s*** to do! This is one of the things that I needed to do, and I’m excited about it.”
