Jamie Lee Curtis and her husband, Christopher Guest, have been married for almost four decades.
Their relationship has survived drug addiction, infertility issues, and even death threats
towards their daughter.
With Curtis' rocky past and present battles, how does she and her hubby make their marriage
work?
Speaking on the TODAY Show, the 63-year-old reflected on the first time she saw her husband.
"I met my husband by seeing his picture in a magazine and saying out loud to a friend
of mine, 'I'm going to marry that dude,' and married him four months later," Curtis said.
It was a spring afternoon in 1984.
The Freaky Friday actress was sitting in her living room.
She began scrolling through a Rolling Stones magazine when she stumbled across some promotional
photographs for 'This Is Spinal Tap.'
Christopher Guest was clad in a plaid button-down shirt, sporting a "waggish smirk."
The friend she was with when this happened was the producer and co-writer of 'Halloween,'
Debra Hill.
Hill knew the actor's agent and called them to leave Curtis's phone number.
But Guest never called back, and the actress went on to date someone else.
As the story goes, Curtis went to drop off her now ex-boyfriend at the airport.
The couple had just called their relationship off.
After leaving the airport, the actress met with some friends in West Hollywood.
"As I sat down at Hugo's, I glanced up and found myself staring straight at Chris, three
tables away.
He waved to me as if to say, 'I'm the guy you called.'
I waved back: 'I'm the woman who called you.'"
the actress wrote for Oprah.com.
"A few minutes later, he got up to leave.
Standing 20 feet away, he shrugged his shoulders and put up his hand as if to say, "I'll see
ya."
As he left, I looked down at my plate."
The very next day, 28 June 1984, Guest called his future wife.
The two had their first date on July 2 at Chianti Ristorante.
By the next month, Guest had to leave to tape 'Saturday Night Live' in New York City for
a year.
And by then, the couple had fallen in love.
Reliving the memory on the 'In Bed With Nick and Megan' podcast, Guest says that he knew
from their first date that Curtis was the right one for him.
While her husband was filming in New York, the actress needed to be in Los Angeles for
her film, 'Perfect'.
They visited each other often.
One day, in September of that year, the two were talking on the phone.
Guest told Curtis that he had gone for a walk on Fifth Avenue.
After she asked what he did on his walk, the comedian asked his love interest, "Do you
like diamonds?"
And so Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest got engaged.
In December of 1984, five months after their first date, the comedic actors tied the knot.
Now, 38 years later, they're still happily married.
To understand how the two make their relationship work is to understand who they are.
Jamie Lee Curtis was born in Santa Monica to celebrity parents Tony Curtis and Janet
Leigh.
Her parents are icons in the film industry.
Tony Curtis' film career spanned six decades, peaking in the 1950s and 1960s.
He starred alongside Marilyn Monroe in 'Some Like It Hot', and was the star of films like
'The Great Impostor', 'Houdini', and 'The Defiant Ones'.
Janet Leigh's acting career also peaked in the 50s and early 60s.
She is famous for her iconic shower scream scene in 'Psycho'.
The actress also starred in 'Little Women', 'The Fog', and 'Touch of Evil.'
Leigh also authored five books and was a singer and dancer.
Talk about a woman who’s done it all.
Sadly, the marriage between Curtis and Leigh was rocky.
Both actors developed substance abuse, and Curtis cheated on his wife several times.
The divorce was a rocky slope too.
The famous actress's substance abuse continued to worsen as the messy proceedings played
on her mind and her heartstrings.
Speaking on his marriage with Leigh, Curtis said, "For a while, we were Hollywood's golden
couple.
I was very dedicated and devoted to Janet.
But in her eyes that goldenness started to wear off.
I realized that whatever I was, I wasn't enough for Janet.
That hurt me a lot and broke my heart."
Christopher Guest was born in New York City.
He is the son of Peter Haden-Guest- a United Nations diplomat who later became the 4th
Baron Haden-Guest- and his second wife- Jean Pauline Hindes, a former vice president of
casting at CBS.
Unlike his wife, Guest was not born into movie stardom, and there's significantly less celebrity
drama in his lineage.
Spending most of his childhood in the UK, he then studied acting at New York University's
Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts.
The Knives Out star often remarks that a major difference between herself and her husband
is that her childhood was more about fame and glamour, whereas Guest's upbringing was
more educated.
As she said in an interview with Good Housekeeping magazine in 2017, she and her husband are
opposites.
"We have been together for 33 years, and we always will be.
He's an intellectual, and I was from the movie star/alcoholic/drug addict side, where ­education
was not the most important thing."
One thing that the two have in common is that they share a similar sense of humor.
Guest is known for his comedic 'mockumentaries', such as 'Best In Show'.
And Curtis, apart from being a scream queen, is also known for comedic roles, such as Wanda
Gershwitz in 'A Fish Called Wanda'.
In their joint interviews, Curtis and Guest are often playful and make a lot of jokes.
When sharing her love story and how she said she'd marry someone she saw in a magazine
with Nick and Megan, Guest says to his wife, "Now to be fair… to be fair, you'd also
said that when you saw a picture of Ben Kingsley".
This is not to say that the famous couple's relationship has been all smooth sailing.
The pair struggled with infertility when they decided to expand their family.
"Adoption was the only way for us," the actress said.
The couple's first child, Annie, was adopted by the pair in 1986.
Their second daughter, Ruby, joined the growing family nine years later.
In 2020, Ruby Guest came out as transgender.
While her parents have been very supportive, there has been a lot of transphobia directed
at Curtis' daughter.
“I have a trans daughter.
There are threats against her life, just her existence as a human being.
There are people that want to annihilate her, and people like her," the American actress
said to the Spanish publication Cadena SER.
This statement came after Curtis was asked how she pulled off such emotion-filled performances
in her movies.
The actress says that her expressions come from real feelings.
There is a constant fear for her daughter's safety.
Curtis continues to speak out about social issues in her interviews.
One topic she is especially passionate about is discussing sobriety.
This is because all throughout the 90s, the 'Freaky Friday' actress was addicted to prescription
medications.
The 'Halloween' actress's history with addiction began in 1989 after she underwent minor plastic
surgery for “hereditary puffy eyes,” she told People magazine.
Curtis was prescribed opiates and soon enough developed an unhealthy relationship with alcohol
and Vicodin.
According to the Everything Everywhere All at Once star, she was a very controlled drug
addict and alcoholic.
She never did it when she worked, and never took painkillers at 10 in the morning.
“It was that sort of late afternoon and early evening — I like to refer to it as
the warm-bath feeling of an opiate," the actress told Variety magazine.
Curtis describes the feeling of opiates as how you feel when your body is cool and you
sink into a warm bath.
She chased this feeling for a decade and kept her addiction well-hidden for as much time.
The actress told People magazine in 2018, "Getting sober remains my single greatest
accomplishment."
She started her sober journey in 1999, after stumbling across an article about Vicodin
addictions in Esquire Magazine.
Curtis told Variety that her family had been loving and supportive during her recovery
journey.
To this day, Curtis and Guest are a happily married couple.
What is the secret to their long-lasting marriage?
Well, for Jamie Lee Curtis, it's pretty simple.
“Don't get divorced,” the actress jokingly told the TODAY!
Show in 2015.
“There’s a recovery phrase that says, ‘Stay on the bus, the scenery will change.’
You think you’re having a bad week, but stay on the bus, because one of these days
you’ll look out the window and it’ll be beautiful,” she explained to Good Housekeeping
magazine adding, “I’m not a wild romantic.
I’m a realist.
I respect him.
And I just don’t leave.”
It's possible to assume that addiction could be hereditary in Jamie Lee Curtis's family.
This makes her battle against it even more inspirational.
In the same breath, it can be assumed that her exposure to the life of celebrities and
their explosive relationships is what made the actress so resilient.
She does not give up or give in easily.
Not to mention she seems to be someone who practices a lot of patience: with herself
and the people around her.
The actress's marriage can be considered successful because she and her husband take what they
have and make it work.
On Oprah.com, Jamie Lee Curtis wrote, "Chris and I have a wonderful, complicated, imperfect
life.
I'll never know why I thought we'd understand each other when I saw his photograph.
Hidden in that smirk, I think, was a little secret that only I knew."