Jamie Lee Curtis was attending the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, when she decided that she — like her parents before her — wanted to pursue a career in acting. Curtis made her professional screen debut the following year (in 1977), playing an unnamed background character in an episode of “Quincy, M.E.” She was 19. This quickly led to other notable TV roles in shows like “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” and “Columbo,” as well s a lead role in the short-lived sitcom “Operation Petticoat.”
During her flurry of TV jobs, Curtis landed her first role in a feature film, playing the intellectual teen Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” The 1978 horror film was a quick, cheap exploitation movie (it only had a budget of about $325,000), but it was a big career move for Curtis. Indeed, she couldn’t have predicted that “Halloween” would become an enormous success, making over $70 million at the box office and spawning multiple sequels and reboots. Curtis has appeared in seven of the 13 “Halloween” movies made to date, so “Halloween” was a career-starter for her in more ways than one.
Of course, back in 1978, Curtis was still nervous. She didn’t have any star power yet and needed to prove herself as an actor. In fact, she’d been working just long enough to know that an actor can be fired from on their first day of shooting. They may have passed an audition, but a director can suddenly change their mind on set after working with a performer for a day.
When interviewed for Rotten Tomatoes‘ 2018 oral history of “Halloween,” Curtis recalled fearfully getting a call from Carpenter after working with him a single day, thinking it might be her “you’re fired” call. Luckily, it was quite the opposite.
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Jamie Lee Curtis knew that some actors get fired after only one day of work
Laurie, tired, with Michael Myers standing behind her in Halloween (1978) – Compass International Pictures
As Curtis recalled, she was living with a roommate named Tina Cassidy — a professional hairdresser — at the time, and they were renting a house in Studio City, California. Curtis said that she had just completed her first day of shooting “Halloween” and returned home for the night. Although “Halloween” takes place in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, it was filmed around Southern California, mostly in South Pasadena. That’s why, if you look closely, you can see palm trees in the background, even though there are no palm trees in the Midwest.
Anyway, Curtis recounted her call with Carpenter as follows:
“In my day — and I’m sure it happens now — people get fired after their first day of work. You know, the director thinks about it and goes, ‘Uh, I made a mistake.’ That’s why I remember this slow walk over to the phone and doing that thing of like, ‘Um, hello?’ He’s from Kentucky, I believe, and he was like, ‘Hey, darlin’, it’s John. I just wanna tell ya how happy I am and how fantastic you were today. I just know it’s gonna be amazing.’ That just doesn’t happen. And that was all John Carpenter. That’s how it began.”
Carpenter seems like a generous and pragmatic filmmaker, from the sound of that exchange. The success of “Halloween” only got Curtis more work, and one can assume Carpenter’s faith in her gave her even more confidence as a performer. Curtis worked with him again on 1980’s “The Fog” (one of Carpenter’s best movies) and soon after secured her position as a film star by landing a lead role in John Landis’ hit 1983 comedy “Trading Places.” She now has an Oscar.
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