I won an Oscar but lost my waistline...

JAMIE 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.”

- By Gabrielle Donnelly

She stops and, ever the first to poke fun at herself, laughs ruefully. “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 narrow blue-green eyes crinkling into that familiar cat-got-the-cream grin.

Her face is crisscrossed with laughter lines now: she’s not a young woman any more and isn’t trying to look like one. In fact she turned 67 on November 22.

“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. At an age when female actors have traditionally been put out to pasture, her career is rollicking from success to success, with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once under her self-confessed expanding belt, a starring role in the James Brooks film Ella McCay released in UK cinemas next month and a recent part in Freakier Friday with Lindsay Lohan.