Jamie Lee Curtis’s parents Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Her parents were both famous American actors. Her father was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His parents’ marriage lasted from 1951 to 1962. During the marriage, the pair had two children: Kelly Curtis and Jamie.
After the marriage ended, Jamie Lee Curtis’ father went on to marry five different women consecutively and had four more children as well. As for her mother, Janet Leigh she only remarried once but had previously been married and divorced twice.
Who Are Jamie Lee Curtis’ Parents?
Janet Leigh (July 6, 1927 – October 3, 2004)
Full name: Jeanette Helen Morrison
Date of birth: October 3, 2004
Age at Death: 77 years
Zodiac Sign: Libra
Place of birth: Merced, California
Parents: Helen Lita and Frederick Robert Morrison
Nationality: American
Ethnicity: White
Marital Status: Married
Spouse: Robert Brandt
Children: Kelly Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis
Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother was an American singer, dancer, and author whose career spanned over five decades. Janet Leigh was born Jeanette Helen Morrison on July 6, 1927, to her parents, Helen Lita and Frederick Robert Morrison. Her father had Scots-Irish and German ancestry while her maternal grandparents were immigrants from Denmark.
According to reports, the actress was raised in abject poverty as her father, Federick struggled to support the family by taking several jobs in places such as factories.
During her formative years, she sang in the local church choir. After her paternal grandfather fell ill, the whole family relocated to Merced.
Leight attended Weber Grammar School and later Stockton High school where she excelled in her academics and even graduated before she clocked sixteen.
Instead of pursuing a college degree, Janet Leigh started acting at the age of 18 after fellow actress Norma Shearer helped her secure a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She would later enroll at the College of Pacific where she majored in music and psychology. While still in college, the Murder, She Wrote actress spent Christmas and summer vacations working at retail shops and dime stores in order to help and support her family.
Although Leigh appeared in several movies, she achieved her biggest success as Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho. She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the movie.
In addition to that, she went on to feature in movies such as Bye Bye Birdie (1963), Harper (1966), Night of the Lepus (1972), and Boardwalk (1979).
As an author, Leigh published four books between 1984 and 2002. Besides her very successful career, Jamie’s mother had two brief marriages as a teenager of which one of annulled. She married Jamie’s father, Tony Curtis in 1951 but the highly publicized union ended in divorce in 1962. Besides Jamie, the former couple had another daughter Kelly together.
Janet Leigh remarried that same year. She married Robert Brandt and remained with him until she died in October 2004. The famous actress died after a year-long battle with vasculitis at the age of 77.
Tony Curtis (June 3, 1925 – September 29, 2010)
Full name: Bernard Schwartz
Nickname: Tony Curtis
Date of birth: June 3, 1925
Age at Death: 85 years old
Zodiac Sign: Gemini
Place of birth: Manhattan, New York City
Parents: Helen Schwartz and Emanuel Schwartz
Siblings: 3(including) Julius Schwartz
Nationality: American
Ethnicity: White
Marital Status: Married
Spouse: Jill Vandenberg
Children: 6 (including Kelly Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis)
Born Bernard Schwartz, Tony Curtis acted in more than 100 films which made him gain popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was born on June 3, 1925. He was raised alongside his three siblings by his parents Helen and Emanuel Schwartz. His parents were Hungarian Jewish emigrants.
At the age of 6, the actor and his brother Julius were placed in an orphanage for a month due to his parents’ inability to do so. Sadly, his brother later got killed by a truck and Curtis joined a neighborhood gang. At the age of 11, he was sent to a Boy Scout camp where he was tamed.
With little and no training, Jamie’s father landed his first acting role in a school stage play.
Following a short time in military service, Tony Curtis moved to Hollywood. He soon got a contract at Universal Pictures and decided to change his name to Anthony Curtis. He made his acting debut in the crime drama, Criss Cross(1949) as a rumba dancer.
With that, he began to land more roles especially due to the fact that he was receiving numerous fan letters. Some of his famous movie roles include Flesh and Fury (1952), No Room for the Groom (1952), Forbidden (1953), and Johny Dark (1954).
As actors, Jamie Lee Curtis’ parents worked together on several projects. some of which are Houdini (1953), The Vikings (1958), and Blake Edwards’ The Perfect Furlough(1958). Having worked together, the parents of the actress then formed their own independent film production company.
Before they divorced, Curtis and Leigh made another movie together, Who Was That Lady? (1960).
Besides acting Jamie’s father was painted as well. He started in the early 1980s and later focused on it during his final years as well. As a painter, Tony Curtis once revealed that his major influences were Picasso, Magritte, and Van Gogh.
In 2007, his painting The Red Table was displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Some of his paints can also be seen at the Tony Vanderploeg Gallery in Carmel, California.
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Although he never received an Oscar award, he received several awards including a Sony Ericsshas on Empire Lifetime Achievement Award and also a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
As for his love life, it seemed the actor never got it right with women as he did with acting and painting. He was married six times and Janet Leigh happened to be his first wife. After the marriage ended, he married Christine Kaufmann and shared two daughters Alexandra and Allegra. His third marriage was to Leslie Allen in 1968. Jamie Lee Curtis’ father had two sons with his third wife before they divorced as well.
Tony Curtis married his fourth wife, Andrea Savio in 1984 and they divorced in 1992. The following year, he married Lisa Deutch and again divorced her the next year.
After his fifth marriage crashed, Tony went looking for love again. He eventually married his sixth and last wife, Jill Vandenberg, who was 45 years younger than him.
During his final years, Tony Curtis suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was hospitalized in July 2010. Sadly, on September 29, 2010, it was made known that the actor died of cardiac arrest at his Henderson home.
His wife Jill, later revealed to the public that he suffered from various lung problems as a result of smoking cigarettes even though he later quit it.
Apparently, Jamie Lee Curtis’ parents were both Oscar nominees which makes her a second-generation Oscar nominee. Her father was nominated for Best Actor for The Defiant Ones in 1959 while he mother received an Oscar nomination for the movie Psycho in 1961.
