Even Jamie Lee Curtis knows the sting of being fired. It happened in her first job

3 hours ago 4

By Jamie Lee Curtis

October 12, 2025 — 5.00am

I think being fired is one of everyone’s greatest fears, right? There’s not an actor I know who doesn’t feel this way, and in show business, there are plenty of stories to support that. As actors, I think we’re all a little terrified. I am an untrained actor – not unprepared, because I’m very prepared when I work – but I’m an accidental actor. I went to the same college as my mother [Janet Leigh]. She was the most famous person who had attended, so she had a big legacy there.

I had a D-plus average in high school. I had no business being in college. I came home from college for Christmas break one year, and I ran into a man who used to teach tennis at my friend’s tennis court in Beverly Hills. His name was Chuck Binder. He goes, “Hey, Jamie, I’m managing actresses now.” (That’s the story of Los Angeles: you’re a coach, but you’re now managing actors.) And I was like, “Oh, cool.” He said, “They’re looking for Nancy Drew at Universal, you should go up for it.” Now, I had brown hair, and I was cute, so I was like, “OK.” So, I went and auditioned for the role of Nancy Drew.

I didn’t get the part, but when I left, they called him and said something like, “She’s not going to get that part, but she was good.” He told me, “You should stick around. You could be an actress.”

Imagine if actor Jamie Lee Curtis hadn’t been fired from her first job, and hadn’t made the film Halloween.

So, I stayed in LA. I went to a lot of auditions, which I didn’t land. One day Chuck said, “There’s this contract program at Universal. They’ve seen your picture, and they would like you to come in and audition.” I did a scene from the play Butterflies Are Free.

Universal was the only studio that still operated a studio system, where an actor auditioned and became part of a studio’s talent pool, a “contract player”. You were paid a nominal amount of money to keep you under contract, and the studio would assign you jobs on their productions.

I was offered a contract and quit college immediately. I wasn’t getting paid a lot of money, but it was enough to live in an apartment in Studio City, and it had a little bit of job security. You would sign a seven-year contract with six-month options to renew.

I was assigned a bunch of little episodic things: Quincy, Emergency, a lesbian biker in The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, a grumpy waitress in the season opener of Columbo.

Curtis accepts her 2023 best supporting actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once.

There was a TV movie they were making, a remake of a movie my dad [Tony Curtis] had starred in, called Operation Petticoat. It was a World War II comedy that he starred in with Cary Grant, where a navy submarine in the middle of the South Pacific is painted pink. The premise of the movie was that they’re sent to pick up five army nurses who are stranded in the middle of the war, and they have to board the submarine.

I was called to audition. I’m sure that every time a contract player auditioned for something, there was a little asterisk right next to your name, which meant they could pay you less. Lo and behold, I got cast as one of the nurses, to play the part opposite my dad’s former role. I’m sure they thought that was cute.

We were halfway through shooting when the producers came to the set. They said, “ABC loves the footage, and they have picked up Operation Petticoat to be a half-hour, single-camera comedy series starting this fall on ABC, and you’re now all series regulars!” We did all of the promos, the upfronts, the magazines – I mean, we were in TV Guide. I’m 18 years old, and I’m the female lead of a TV series. It was a big deal.

I was embarrassed and a little humiliated, and I felt that sting of the adrenaline hit.

We made it through one season with meh reviews, meh ratings. One day, I was called to lunch at the commissary at Universal Studios with Ms James [Monique James, who ran the contract department]. She said to me, “I have bad news. You’ve been fired. The truth is, they’ve let go of almost the entire cast of 16 actors.” I immediately thought, Oh f---, that’s it. They’re not going to pick up my [contract player] option. I’m going to lose my $235 a week, and I’m going to have to go back to college. I’m not going to be able to pay my rent. I was terrified.

I was embarrassed and a little humiliated, and I felt that sting of the adrenaline hit, the shame that someone was looking at me like, “You’re not good enough.” And for sure I thought I was going to lose my contract, my paycheque, and I was going to have to move back in with my parents. All of a sudden, I was just going to be a hustling actor. I literally thought, “This is it. It’s over.”

Now, there are too many people who’ve gone through this, and certainly people with way rougher stories than mine. But it was real. I was fired from a TV series by a network for a studio who employed me, so, I thought that made me unemployable.

That day I was panicking driving home. I knew it was unlikely they were going to pick up my option. I’m sure I was sobbing.

A week or two later, Chuck sent me for an audition for this little movie that was being made in Hollywood by John Carpenter, Halloween. A horror movie. I auditioned many times and ultimately got the lead part of Laurie Strode. And I am sure having the daughter of the woman who starred in Psycho star in this film would be a little bit of a curio, a tiny frisson.

Halloween was my first job after Operation Petticoat, so there were some residual feelings. I remember every second of the first day of work, from where I parked to how I felt. That evening I got home to my house in the Valley, where I lived with my roommate. The phone rang. My roommate said, “Hey, Jamie, it’s for you. It’s John Carpenter,” as she covered the phone with her hand. I remember the amount of time it took me to walk to that phone, 10 feet that took what seemed like four hours. I let out a breath and said, “Hello?”

He said, “Hey, darlin’, I just want you to know that you were fantastic today, and I’m so happy, and you were just wonderful, and it’s going to be great. And I just wanted to tell you that.”

Curtis in a scene from the original Halloween movie in 1978.

I recently got an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the American Film Institute. And when I received my doctorate, I read this to the student body: “You can plan all you want, but your life is going to hinge on a couple of seconds you never see coming. What you do in that moment of crisis, in that moment of hinging, that’s going to determine the rest of your life. And you’re not going to know what you’ll do until that happens. You can’t plan for that moment.”

Now, I’m not going to lie to you and say that getting fired from Operation Petticoat gave me a fire in my belly, and I was going to show them. The truth is, my firing gave me tremendous insecurity. But by accident, the couple of seconds I never saw coming was getting fired from that TV show. But had I stayed on Operation Petticoat, I would have missed the boat with Halloween [now a near-50-year-old horror movie phenomenon, including 13 films, video games, comic books, and Michael Myers masks]. I would have missed what became my lifelong trajectory, attached to a pumpkin, for 45 years.

So, yes, life hinges on a couple of seconds you may not see coming. For me, being fired was a moment of true shock and awe, and I didn’t know at the time that it was better for me to have gotten fired. Even though I went through all the shame and the self-doubt and the insecurity that went along with it, what came from it, in my lucky circumstances, was a movie that then ended up being something.

Edited extract from All the Cool Girls Get Fired (Penguin) by Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill, out October 14.

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