Jamie Lee Curtis Tearfully Reflects on Working With Child Actors

Jamie Lee Curtis has taken on a wide array of roles over the years, including a number of parts that had her sharing the screen with child actors. In her debut film, Halloween, Curtis played a babysitter, and she went on to work with a number of other child actors. Curtis said that reflecting on her time with young stars makes her feel emotional.

Jamie Lee Curtis got emotional when talking about working with child actors

Though Curtis grew up around the film industry because of her parents, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, she didn’t start acting until her college years. In a recent conversation with Entertainment Tonight, Curtis reflected on some of her career highlights. When asked about her role in My Girl alongside Macauley Culkin and Anna Chlumsky, Curtis became visibly emotional.

“This is emotional for me,” she said. “They were so young.”

Culkin and Chlumsky were 11 years old in the film. Curtis said watching children do an adult’s job wasn’t easy for her.

“Watching young actors do an adult’s job… It’s very challenging,” she said. “It’s hard for me, it’s hard to wrestle with that.”

Anna Chlumsky shared what she learned from the older actor on set

My Girl was Chlumsky’s breakthrough role. Curtis filmed many scenes with the younger actor and served as a mentor to her alongside Dan Aykroyd. 

“They taught me little exercises,” Chlumsky told Entertainment Tonight, noting that she continued to use the warm-up exercises for years to come.

“Oh yeah! I still do the ‘silent scream’ and ‘tiny face,” she said. “That’s so funny that I spoke about it then because yeah, [Jamie] did teach us that.”

She shared why she found Curtis’ tips useful.

“You know, it gets energy in your face when you’re kind of losing energy,” she said. “And if it’s cold outside, it makes you warm. Yeah, I definitely do. I still use that.”

Curtis and Chlumsky both appeared in My Girl 2 in 1994.

Jamie Lee Curtis spoke about being the child of two celebrities

Though Curtis was not a child star, she grew up around the film industry because of her parents. Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis were both successful actors. Though Curtis ended up following in her parents’ footsteps, she said they never pushed her to do so. Still, Curtis said she learned a great deal about the industry from them.

“My parents were really wonderful people,” she told the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. “They said, ‘Do what you want to do, but do it well.’ Any field was fine with them, as long as you did it as well as you could. They did not necessarily give me specific acting advice, because I am different than they are, but you know things just by watching them and being around them.”

Despite her parents’ fame and her eventual career path, Curtis said she had a very normal childhood.

“My life was straight out normal,” she said. “I went to school, I had friends, we played, we did everything that a kid does. It was really a normal childhood, which is wonderful, because no matter what you do, then you have a substantial base in your life to go away from, so that, like any plant or anything, you can go around and grow, look and investigate, but you still have that root. If you don’t have that, that’s when you get very insecure.”

Curtis has two children of her own.