Jamie Lee Curtis spoke to Variety about her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, sharing drugs with her dad and how she finally got sober for the magazine’s Recovery Issue.
“I was the wildly controlled drug addict and alcoholic. I never did it when I worked. I never took drugs before 5 p.m. I never, ever took painkillers at 10 in the morning,” the “Freaky Friday” actor told Marc Malkin.
“It was that sort of late afternoon and early evening — I like to refer to it as the warm-bath feeling of an opiate,” she added.
“It’s like the way you naturally feel when your body is cool, and you step into a warm bath, and you sink into it. That’s the feeling for me, what an opiate gave me, and I chased that feeling for a long time.”
Addiction did run in her family, though, as her brother, Nicholas, died of a heroin overdose in 1994, while her dad, actor Tony Curtis, struggled with cocaine, heroin and alcohol.
“I shared drugs with my dad. I did cocaine and freebased once with my dad. But that was the only time I did that, and I did that with him. He did end up getting sober for a short period of time and was very active in recovery for about three years. It didn’t last that long,” she added.
Curtis said that “no one” knew about her 10-year painkiller problem, not even her husband, Christopher Guest.
Curtis said that it took a friend calling her on her addiction ― after witnessing her wash down five Vicodin with wine ― before she finally got help.
Today, she’s been sober for two decades and regularly attends recovery meetings.
“I’m breaking the cycle that has basically destroyed the lives of generations in my family,” Curtis said in an interview with People magazine last year. “Getting sober remains my single greatest accomplishment … bigger than my husband, bigger than both of my children and bigger than any work, success, failure. Anything.”