I love getting old! I'm now smarter, prettier, funnier, louder and softer ...even if I have lost my waistline!

Jamie Lee Curtis on ‘awful’ roles... and her Oscar

- BY GABRIELLE DONNELLY

ЈAMIE Lee Curtis is a morning person. "It's my nature," she says cheerfully when we meet by Zoom. It's a respectable 10am in Los Angeles but Jamie has already been up for hours.

"I was out late last night at an event honouring women in film, so I got very little sleep," she admits. "But I was up and awake at about 3.30am or 4am this morning. I wake up this way every day - optimistic and energetic." She stops and, ever the first to poke fun at herself, laughs. "By 4pm or 5pm, maybe I'm less optimistic and a little more tired - maybe a little more grouchy. But in the mornings I'm fine."

She's certainly looking fine this bright Beverly Hills morning, erect and graceful in an elegant black suit, her in-your-face white hair gleaming in a smart bob, those blue-green eyes crinkling into that familiar cat-got-the-cream grin.

Her face is criss-crossed with laughter lines: she's not a young woman any more and isn't trying to look like one. She turned 67 last week.

"And I love it!" she exclaims, happily. "I love ageing! Because ageing brings wisdom and ideas, and the best thing is that it's not just the fragments of stimuli any more but the kind of completion of circles of ideas, which is so exciting, because the privilege of getting old - if you're lucky enough to survive to get old - is that you get to complete a full life.

"These days, I am smarter, prettier, funnier, softer, louder, more opinionated, more political, more well read than I was when I was 30. I wouldn't want to be 30 again. I wouldn't want to be 20 again. I wouldn't want to be a day younger than I am, even though the pantyhose I'm wearing are cutting into my no-longer waistline. 'Cause I'm a person without a waistline now. I won an Oscar but lost my waistline!""

If anyone has reason to feel good about her life, it's Jamie Lee.