Jamie Lee Curtis Shares the Secret to Her 40-Year Marriage
Hollywood marriages are notorious for burning red hot and fizzling out fast, but 40 years into their partnership, Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest are an exception to the rule. In a new interview with 60 Minutes, the True Lies actress opened up about her longstanding marriage to the director, best known for This Is Spinal Tap and other satirical mockumentary comedies, and shared their number one secret to long-lasting love.
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Curtis says she knew immediately upon seeing her husband that they would end up together. “I just really did an old-fashioned ‘Spanky and Our Gang’ double take,” Curtis told The Washington Post in 1985 (via E! News). “I said, ‘Whoever this guy is, is it. That’s as good as it gets.'”
Six months later, the couple wed. And, as it turns out, the rule to keep the magic alive after all those years is simple: Curtis says that good, old-fashioned commitment to seeing it work has carried the couple through life’s ups and downs.
“My mother was married four times, my father was married five times—that’s nine—and my stepfather was married three. So I come from an immediate family of 12 marriages,” Curtis said in the interview, referring to her parents, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, both megastars of Hollywood’s gilded age. “So my joke [is], ‘I’m still married to my first husband.’ It was important to me that I stay married to my husband.”
This is not the first time Curtis has dished on the longevity of her relationship. In December 2024, as the couple’s 40th wedding anniversary drew near, Curtis told Entertainment Tonight (ET) a similarly simple secret to long-lasting love.
“You don’t leave,” the Freaky Friday actress explained. “I’ve been sober for a long time, and we have a phrase in recovery: ‘If you stay on the bus, the scenery will change.’ And that’s marriage. It’s like, all of a sudden you literally want to hate each other and then the next day it’s a pretty sunny day and the dog does something cute or your child does something cute and you look at each other like, ‘Aww, gosh.’ And then you’re on another track.”
“So I think perseverance, patience, gentleness—and a really good dose of hatred,” the actress quipped.
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The pair share two children, Annie Guest and Ruby Guest, now 38 and 29, respectively.
And, after more than 45 years on the silver screen, Curtis’s career is still bustling. In 2023, she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and in 2024, she won an Emmy for her role as Donna Berzato on FX’s The Bear.
Additionally, Curtis now runs her own production company, as well as her own charity, which has raised over $1 million for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and another million for victims of the recent California wildfires, 60 Minutes reports.
Behind the scenes, the Halloween scream queen and her doting director husband try to pack in quality time. That—and a little dose of hatred—keeps the relationship in fighting shape.