In the week she received a Golden Globe nomination for 'Freaky Friday', her first lead role in 10 years, Jamie Lee Curtis talks to Donald Clarke.
'Meet my grandmother. Meet Helen Schwartz," Jamie Lee Curtis says, taking my hand and placing it on her midriff. "Here, feel that." Before you get to interview a film star, you tend to receive an e-mail explaining all the things you are not allowed to do: ask for autographs, get them to say "hi" to your radio listeners, proffer them your idiotic film script. This time round, there was, as far as I can recall, nothing in the correspondence about not groping the talent, but I feel sure it's not the sort of thing the authorities would encourage.
Anyway, she isn't taking no for an answer, so I have a tentative squeeze and say, because I have to say something, that it still feels pretty firm to me.
She makes flattered noises, but clearly still feels that Grandma Schwartz's fatty legacy is accumulating around her waist.
"But my mother's genes got my kids through college," she laughs, indicating the impressive upper half of her body. "I am genetically gorgeous."
Her mother, of course, is the icily beautiful actress, Janet Leigh, while her father, the former Bernie Schwartz, is the inimitable Tony Curtis. Jamie Lee Curtis has survived the perils that come with celebrity parents to grow into one of those actresses to whom - although she doesn't see it this way - everybody seems to warm. Over the past few months she has been receiving justifiably ecstatic reviews, and has just received a Golden Globe best comedy actress nomination for her performance as a mother who swaps bodies with her teenage daughter in Disney's new version of Freaky Friday.
"I have had a great time as an actress," she says. "But given that I have appeared in movies like Prom Night and pieces of shit like Virus, it's probably not surprising that I've never been particularly appreciated. The last thing I expected was that I would ever headline a movie again. And the very last thing I expected was that I would be getting rave reviews from the New York Times for a Disney family film."
But she has received decent notices throughout her career. Her performance in John Carpenter's 1978 shocker, Halloween, was much admired, she won a BAFTA for Trading Places and her comic turn in A Fish Called Wanda went down well.
"Well I tended to get those surprised reviews: 'We didn't think she could do that.' I got decent reviews for True Lies, but that was 10 years ago," she says. "And I was lucky to be cast in a good supporting role by John Boorman in The Tailor of Panama a few years ago. But really I haven't been cast in a lead role for about 10 years. So, I am chuffed."
Curtis barks out the last sentence in an earthy cockney accent. Though she claims to have actually fallen asleep during an earlier interview with a French journalist, she appears to be wired now. Spinning off into comic riffs and screwing her face into contortions (when she isn't offering me her abdomen), she demonstrates the talents that have made her, in her own words, "a natural, untrained actress".
If it does come so naturally then, considering who her parents are, it must surely be all in those genes, mustn't it?
"Well, it is certainly the family business," she says. "But I am not that happy with saying it's a genetic thing. I never received a penny from my family during my career, not a penny. I have been an actress for 25 years. I have worked hard. So surely I should get some of the credit myself. This is my own. My dad's father wasn't an actor, so he gets to call all his work his own. Don't I?"
Phew! This is obviously a slightly tricky issue. But surely nobody is saying that she was handed her career on a plate, are they?
"Yes, they are," she says, getting into her stride. "I even get this from friends. They'll come up to me and say: 'You know you were actually quite good in that,' as if there is some supposition that I am only in the business because of my family."
Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh split up when Jamie Lee was still an infant. Her relationship with her father remains complex. They didn't see much of one another until Jamie was a grown woman and when they did finally get together both of them were battling drink and drugs dependencies. (She has been clean for years, but, sadly, her half-brother, Nicholas Curtis, died of an overdose in 1994.) How close is she to her father?
"You know, I don't even know him now," she says. "I have a nice relationship with him. I like him. I care about him. The loss of my brother brought the whole family together somewhat, but I still don't have a tight relationship with him. If you live in separate places there is only so much you can do. And now I have children of my own and have been married for 19 years."
Curtis's husband is the actor and director, Christopher Guest. Best known as a star of the classic heavy metal mockumentary, Spinal Tap, Guest came into the title of Lord Haden Guest on the death of his father in 1996. After Tony Blair's reform of the House of Lords, he no longer gets to sit in the upper house, but he and Lady Jamie Lee Haden Guest were able to attend one state opening of parliament before the cull.
"I found it treacherous, because I was very concerned that I would ruin it for him," she says. "I was worried that my fame would somehow tarnish it for him, so I really tried to be decorous and not attract undue attention."
The photographs of the state opening showed her looking very demure, I tell her.
"Yes that's right," she says, dropping back into cockney. "I had a tiara and everything. I am a respectable girl, after all."
So what was the most enjoyable part of the experience?
"Oh, the gift shop," she says. "I got a great baseball cap, which I gave to John Boorman - and he lost it. It's out there in Ireland somewhere."
Her ladyship has a full intellectual life these days. She has published a series of successful children's books and is a pretty decent photographer.
"It all comes from emotion. I am not a cerebral person at all," she barks. "I only ever did one cerebral thing in my life. After I made Halloween, I could have kept on making horror films and could have made a lot of money. But I knew that I would find it impossible to break free from that genre. So, I decided to say no."
This rare example of careful thinking paid off. The day after her decision she was offered the role of the doomed Playmate, Dorothy Stratton, in 1981's Death of a Centrefold. Suddenly, despite the fact that she'd "always had the same body", she found herself being touted as a superhumanly buff sex symbol.
"It was kind of amusing. I was playing the good, intellectual girls in all these horror films," she laughs. "But the moment I took my top off I became legitimate."
At the age of 45, she is a little grey around the temples, but still looks trim and nimble.
"Oh, but hang on," she says. "Meet my grandmother."
Which is where we came in.