Halloween star Jamie Lee Curtis officially turned 61 today. The Golden Globe winner has had an impressive entertainment career that’s spanned more than four decades, but will always be most known for her iconic turn as Laurie Strode. In her film debut back in 1978, the actress starred as the young protagonist in John Carpenter’s low-budget independent slasher movie entitled Halloween.
At the time, there’s no way she could’ve known that her performance as a babysitter being terrorized by a psychotic mass murderer would catapult her to stardom. The sleeper hit established Curtis as the most recognizable “scream queen” in modern cinema though and led to her appearance in a string of horror films throughout the ’80s, including The Fog, Prom Night and Terror Train. She reprised the role of Laurie in four sequels over the next four decades, too, including Halloween II (1981), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002), and Halloween (2018).
Even Curtis has admitted that some of those later titles are less than impressive, but she more than made up for the franchise’s blunders with last year’s direct sequel to the original Halloween. The movie retconned all of the other follow-ups and proved to be a massive success at the box office. Now, two sequels, entitled Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, are currently in the works and thankfully, Curtis is set to star in both, alongside several of the 1978 movie’s original cast members. The former film just wrapped production, in fact, and is set to be released next year on October 16th.
Today (and every day) is for honoring Jamie Lee Curtis, though, the scream queen who gave several generations of horror fans someone to root for every October. She’s a legend in every sense of the word and we can’t wait to see what she has in store for Michael Myers in the next Halloween installment.
