No surgery for Jamie Lee

Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't really look like a Hollywood actress.

She may be the daughter of Hollywood royalty - her mother is Janet Leigh, of the shower scene in Psycho; her father is the once gorgeous, but now slightly embarrassingly permatanned, Tony Curtis.

She may, in her 25-year career as an actress, have been in some high-grossing movies such as Halloween, Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda.

She may have once even insured her long, trademark legs for a million dollars, but right here, right now she's the opposite of a glitzy, high-maintenance star.

She stomps into a suite at the Dorchester hotel, clad in a black-leather jacket, black boots and a short-ish skirt.

'Where's the tea?' she says. 'I need tea.' Then she collapses, looks at me, smiles in a jaunty Jamie Lee Curtis way and says: 'Who the hell are you?'

Once we have established who I am, she tells me why she's here, to promote her new film, Freaky Friday, about a warring mother and daughter who swap souls to amusing effect.

'If I had my way I wouldn't be here,' she says. It turns out that her mother, who is now 76 and has suffered from bulimia for 25 years, is very ill in Los Angeles.

'I wasn't going to do any press because I like to look after my parents and they are both getting on a bit. I have a teenage daughter and a seven-year-old boy and most of the time I'm Mom.

'When I go away I sort of panic. I have to do that mental thing of, 'Right, Annie needs to go to volleyball' and 'Tommy needs to do his homework'. Mind you, I don't get offered many jobs now, so I'm grateful the Hollywood powers even think about me!'

And then she roars with laughter.

The truth is, those Hollywood producers are probably terrified of her. She certainly speaks her mind. She lives in LA with her husband, the film-maker and actor Christopher Guest, and their two adopted children in what she describes as a 'very Hollywood-type place'.

Yet she does very un-Hollywood-type things. She drinks caffeinated coffee and tea. 'Can't do without it,' she says. She refuses to drive everywhere. 'So lazy, so awful.'

She seems perfectly content to talk about subjects that most actresses would consider off-limits. 'Why did I not have my own children? It was physically not possible.'

She's also rather infamous for her attitude towards cosmetic surgery. 'A few years ago, I started to have little bits of everything done,' she says. She pulls a face to show where she had 'some work' under her eyes and 'a bit of Botox' on her forehead.

'Believe me, none of it works. Sure, it's good for a day or so. It makes you feel better because you believe you look younger, but then you look in the mirror and what do you see staring out? A 45-year-old with grey hair.

'Look at me! I've got grey hair and I don't care. I hate dyeing it - it's so boring and time-consuming. But it took me a long time to realise that and accept it.'

She says she started 'messing around' with her body about five years ago. 'I turned 40 and I found it really hard to accept the fact I was getting older. I wasn't getting offered so many acting parts any more. I kept thinking it was because I was looking 'old'. I was suffering from some self-esteem issues then.'

Eighteen months ago she decided to deal with these issues and had herself photographed in an American magazine wearing nothing but her underwear.

'I was 43 at the time,' she says, 'and known for having this perfect body. I was even in a film called Perfect.

'Anyway, the deal was, I would be photographed absolutely as I am - no make-up, no airbrushing, no fixing and fiddling - and then on the next page there would be the airbrushed, madeup picture of me.'

'I was trying to show women that what you see in magazines is not the real thing. I think a lot of women understood why I did it and applauded me for it. Others thought it was a desperate publicity scam because my career was in decline. That was frustrating.'

Whatever she may think about herself, she actually looks pretty perky. She's slim and trim and her hair is grey but it suits her. She's very attractive in the way she always has been - impish, slight, beautiful smile, sexy, gravelly voice.

She seems almost unchanged from when she burst onto the screen in Halloween when she was only 18.

'You think I'm unchanged?' she says. 'God, I am so changed. Look at my skin,' she says, pointing to her wrinkles.

'Mind you, I'm a lot happier now. I wouldn't want to be a teenager at all now. I remember feeling so odd within my skin. I watch my daughter and I see the way she tugs at her clothes. They have such an amazing ability to look uncomfortable and I don't really want to go back there.'

Did she find it easier to film her part playing the 'adolescent' in Freaky Friday because of being around her daughter so much?

'God no. It was nothing to do with that. I've never been a method actor. I've never had an acting lesson. I know this sounds horrible but really I'm a very good actress!'

She was probably born to be a performer. As a child she met all sorts of big producers and actors of her parents' generation - Norman Jewison, Sydney Lumet.

'People always wonder about my childhood,' she says. 'I suppose it's because my parents were considered to be so glamorous, but we weren't really Hollywood royalty.

'My father left when I was three and my mother remarried and moved me and my sister Kelly to a very mid-America-type suburb. I grew up on a ranch, so it was actually very normal.'

She always wanted to be an actress, though. 'I enjoyed being the centre of attention. But the work I have done stands for itself. I've never worked with anyone who knew my parents. I do believe I've made it on my own merits and it pisses me off when people imply otherwise.'

It wasn't always plain sailing. There was a very well-documented time of her life, in the early Eighties, when she went a bit wild.

'Actually, I didn't go wild,' she says. 'In fact, I was probably a bit prudish. I didn't lose my virginity until I was 18 and, after that, I only had a few boyfriends before I met my husband.

'No, I'd say I had a quietly subdued and controlled addiction. Absolutely no one knew about it. I'd turn up for work and look normal and act normal and at night I'd go home and snort a pile of cocaine.'

She does say in her defence, however, that she was in her early twenties and that having some sort of addiction was not then (and probably isn't now) particularly uncommon.

'I wasn't the only one with problems,' she says. 'I think too much is made of it.'

She is now fiercely anti-drugs. 'My half-brother died of a drug overdose 11 years ago. I've seen a lot of damage through drugs in my family.'

Her father was renowned for his drug-taking. Lee Curtis used to say that snorting coke with her father was how she got close to him. 'I don't think that now. I am close to him and drugs are not part of it.'

She kicked drugs in 1983 when she met her husband, the director of This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show.

'He's a wonderful, clever man. We are very good together.' For a while he was Lord Haden-Guest of Saling, Essex, and Lee Curtis got to go to the state opening of Parliament in a tiara.

'Oh, that was fun,' she says, 'but since the shake-up in the House of Lords, he's lost his seat.'

She's still aware of her demons. 'None of us is perfect,' she says. 'Every woman I know is juggling - there's the career and the children and the marriage. I know I'm lucky that I don't necessarily have to work - I've been careful with my money - but we all need props to make us feel better.

'I used to drink. I don't think I realised I was drinking quite a lot, but I was. Most women I know suffer terrible guilt. Even if they provide the best childcare, they still feel terrible about leaving their children and we all have a different way of coping with it.

'When you drink you think, 'This will make me feel better.' But then your kids get the message that, basically, alcohol is the way to solve problems. Then they start drinking.

'Go and look at your life. Make adjustments or your kids will be like a paparazzi picture, the one of you drunk and disorderly - which will haunt you for ever. That's what your children do to you. They show you your faults etched in them for ever.'

And for someone who has been through it all herself - the drink, the drugs, the divorce, her mother's eating disorder and her father's drug habit - she should know.

Freaky Friday opens on Friday.