An Oscar®-winning Hollywood icon, Jamie Lee Curtis is also the “Scream Queen” who can conjure up the Haunted Mansion’s Madame Leota. She states, “There’s an entire industry built on the fact that people like to be frightened, and I understand it.”
Born in Santa Monica, California, to Hollywood power couple Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee excelled as a performer, winning people over with her exuberant personality from an early age. Originally planning to major in law enforcement in college, an acting manager suggested Jamie Lee try auditioning. To her surprise, she was signed to a contract at Universal, one of the last performers to be so engaged. After being released from a TV series gig, Jamie thought her career was over. Two weeks later, however, came an audition for a John Carpenter picture titled Halloween (1978). Jamie Lee was ultimately cast as Laurie Strode, the heroine of the film, which became a smash hit and cemented the performer’s star status in Hollywood. She would go on to anchor other horror classics, too, including John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and slashers Prom Night (1980) and Terror Train (1980).
Jamie Lee would go on to demonstrate her versatility with a variety of captivating roles like the con artist Wanda Gershwitz in A Fish Called Wanda (1988), suburban housewife turned international spy Helen Tasker in 20th Century’s True Lies (1994), the no-nonsense mom Tess Coleman in Disney’s remake of the classic body-swap comedy Freaky Friday (2003), wealthy businesswoman and dog mom Viviane Ashe, also known as Aunt Viv in Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008) and Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 (2011), and mother of the groom Gail Byer Olsen in You Again (2010).
In 2023, Jamie Lee returned to both Disney and the macabre genre to portray the legendary Madame Leota in Haunted Mansion, inspired by the classic theme park attraction. “You can only imagine the joy that I expressed when my agents called me and said that they wanted me to play Madame Leota in the Haunted Mansion movie. I was born and raised in California, raised my kids here and have probably been on that ride 25 times in my life. It was an immediate thrill,” said Jamie Lee. “Madame Leota is the mystery date of the movie. She is the unknown entity. She is the woman behind the crystal ball,” Jamie Lee observes. “We’ve seen her on the ride, but we don’t know why she’s in the ball. How’d she get there? Is she trapped in the ball, or does she like it there? Is it something she’s happy about or frustrated about? What’s fun about the movie is we get to explore that, because she’s needed to help answer some questions about what’s going on in the Haunted Mansion.”
“Jamie Lee Curtis is everything you think she is and more,” says Haunted Mansion director Justin Simien. “For a character so iconic like Madame Leota, you needed somebody iconic to play her. What I love about her is that she’s just so relentlessly authentic, and it’s really difficult to channel authenticity when you’re just a head in a ball, and somehow she does it, and somehow she brings you into her story and into her presence. She’s funny and electric. It was thrilling to work with her.” As for her next Disney project, Jamie Lee will reprise her role as Tess Coleman for the upcoming Freaky Friday 2, coming soon.
As with her acting career, Jamie Lee became an author unexpectedly, when she realized that her 4-year-old daughter, Annie, had started to grow and change. “I wrote a list of things that she used to not be able to do; now she could. And at the end of it, I wrote three things, and I started to cry: ‘When I was little, I didn’t know what a family was. When I was little, I didn’t know what dreams were. When I was little, I didn’t know who I was. But now I do.’ I realized, ‘Oh, this is a book for children.’” Today, Jamie Lee is the author of 13 best-selling books, all exploring core childhood issues, including titles such as Big Words for Little People and This Is Me: A Story of Who We Are and Where We Came From.
Jamie Lee is also the founder and CEO of My Hand In Yours™, a charitable organization that offers comfort and celebratory gifts where 100 percent of every sale is donated directly to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, with which the star has been associated for over 25 years. For her many performances, Jamie Lee has received a British Academy Film Award, two Golden Globe® Awards, and nominations for a Primetime Emmy® Award and a Grammy®. Most recently, Jamie Lee won an Academy Award® for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023).
“I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and I’ve been successful at it since I was 19,” notes Jamie Lee of her Hollywood star status. “There’s not a day I don’t walk down the street, and somebody goes, ‘Hey, I love you. You’re fantastic.’ And I appreciate it. I get it. It’s been my gig.”