Jamie Lee Curtis (born November 22, 1958) is an American actress, producer, children's author, and activist. Known for her performances of film and television, she is one of the most prolific actors of the horror and slasher genres and has been labeled as a scream queen. Curtis has received multiple accolades, including a British Academy Film Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and nominations for an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. She came to prominence with her portrayal of Lt. Barbara Duran on the ABC sitcom Operation Petticoat (1977–78). In 1978, she made her feature film debut playing Laurie Strode in John Carpenter's slasher film Halloween, which established her as a scream queen and led to a string of parts in horror films such as The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train (all 1980) and Roadgames (1981). She reprised the role of Laurie in the sequels Halloween II (1981), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002), Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2022). Curtis's film work spans many genres, including the cult comedies Trading Places (1983)—for which she won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress—and A Fish Called Wanda (1988), for which she received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress. Her role in the 1985 film Perfect earned her a reputation as a sex symbol. She won a Golden Globe Award for her role as Helen Tasker in James Cameron's action thriller True Lies (1994). Curtis's other notable film credits include Blue Steel (1990), My Girl (1991), Forever Young (1992), Mother's Boys (1993), Virus (1999), Drowning Mona (2000), The Tailor of Panama (2001), Freaky Friday (2003), Christmas with the Kranks (2004), You Again (2010), Knives Out (2019), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). To date, her films have grossed in excess of US$2.3 billion at the box office. Curtis received a Golden Globe and a People's Choice Award for her role as Hannah Miller on ABC's Anything But Love (1989–1992), and earned an Primetime Emmy nomination for Nicholas' Gift (1998). She also starred as Cathy Munsch on the Fox series Scream Queens (2015–16), for which she received her seventh Golden Globe nomination. Curtis has written numerous children's books, including Today I Feel Silly, and Other Moods That Make My Day (1998), which made The New York Times's best-seller list. In 2016, IndieWire named her one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. Curtis is a daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. She is married to Christopher Guest, with whom she has two adopted children. Due to her marriage with Guest, who is the 5th Baron Haden-Guest in the United Kingdom, Curtis is a baroness, though she does not use this title. Curtis was born in Santa Monica, California, to actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Her father was Jewish, a son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, from Mátészalka. Two of her maternal great-grandparents were Danish, while the rest of her mother's ancestry was German and Scots-Irish. Curtis has an older sister, Kelly Curtis, who is also an actress, and four half-siblings (all from her father's remarriages): Alexandra, actress Allegra Curtis, Benjamin, and Nicholas Curtis (who died in 1994 of a drug overdose). Curtis's parents divorced in 1962. After the divorce, she stated her father was "not around" and that he was "not interested in being a father." She was raised by her mother and her stepfather, stockbroker Robert Brandt. Curtis attended elite schools Westlake School (now Harvard-Westlake School) and Beverly Hills High School in Los Angeles, and graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut in 1976. Returning to California in 1976, she attended her mother's alma mater, the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and studied law. She dropped out after one semester to pursue an acting career. Curtis's film debut occurred in the 1978 horror film Halloween, in which she played the role of Laurie Strode. The film was a major success and was considered the highest-grossing independent film of its time, earning accolades as a classic horror film. The producer, Debra Hill, specifically cast Curtis because her mother, Leigh, had been known as a horror icon. Curtis was subsequently cast in several horror films, garnering her the title "scream queen." She would also return to the Halloween franchise seven times, playing Strode again in the sequels Halloween II (1981), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002), Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2022), and having an uncredited voice role in Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). Her next film following Halloween was The Fog, which was helmed by Halloween director John Carpenter. The horror film opened in February 1980 to mixed reviews but strong box office, starting Curtis as a horror film starlet. Her next film, Prom Night, was a low-budget Canadian slasher film released in July 1980. The film, for which she earned a Genie Award nomination for Best Performance by a Foreign Actress, was similar in style to Halloween, yet received negative reviews which marked it as a disposable entry in the then-popular slasher genre. That year, Curtis also starred in Terror Train, which opened in October and met with negative reviews akin to Prom Night. Both films performed moderately well at the box office. Curtis's roles in the latter two films served a similar function to that of Strode—the main character whose friends are murdered and is practically the only protagonist to survive. Film critic Roger Ebert, who gave negative reviews to all three of Curtis's 1980 films, said that Curtis "is to the current horror film glut what Christopher Lee was to the last one—or Boris Karloff was in the 1930s." In 1981, she appeared alongside Stacey Keach in the Australian thriller film Roadgames, directed by Carpenter's friend Richard Franklin; her importation, which was requested by the film's American distributor AVCO Embassy Pictures, was contested by the Sydney branch of Actors Equity. Although the film was a box office bomb in Australia and Franklin later regretted not increasing the size of Curtis's role, it has achieved a cult following and was championed by Quentin Tarantino. In 1997, she was inducted into the Fangoria Hall of Fame.