Jamie Lee Curtis talks about sitting in front row at Oscars as a nominee

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood star Jamie Lee Curtis is looking back at her accomplishments on and off the big screen. The 66-year-old star recently recalled attending the 95th Academy Awards in 2023, when she won her first Oscar for ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’.

Upon arriving at the awards show, Curtis remembered how it quickly became apparent that she and her castmates had earned particularly exciting seating assignments, reports ‘People’ magazine.

She told AARP The Magazine, “As soon as Ke (Huy Quan) and Steph Hsu and Michelle Yeoh came and sat in the same row, I literally walked up to each one of them and I went, ‘Ke, where are we?’ And he said, ‘We're at the Oscars’. ‘And where are you sitting?’ And he said, ‘In the front row’”

Curtis and her fellow nominees “never, ever, ever, ever, ever thought that they would be sitting in the front row at the Academy Awards as nominees”, she said. “That moment for me was the whole thing. It was mind-blowing. And still is”.

As per ‘People’, Yeoh, 62, and Quan, 53, also earned Oscar statuettes that night, along with the Best Picture winner’s writer-director-producers Daniel Kwan and David Scheinert. Curtis said in her acceptance speech that it "looks like I am standing up here by myself, but I'm not. I am hundreds of people, I am hundreds of people”.

“I was raised in show business, a business that is ageist, misogynist and pigeonholing”, she said. “I’ve watched the sad reality when show business no longer wants you. I watched it with my parents (Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis), who went from the height of their intense fame to nobody wanting them anymore”.

But now in her sixties and busier in Hollywood than ever, Curtis named “constant curiosity” as her “freedom”.