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- Jamie Lee Curtis and husband Christopher Guest have been married nearly 34 years.
- Jamie Lee knew she'd marry Christopher before she even met him.
- The couple shares two kids: Annie and Thomas.
Jamie Lee Curtis may be a scream queen best known for her role as Laurie Strode in Halloween, but her real life story is sweet, not scary. In honor of the horror film franchise's latest installment (in theaters October 19), we're looking back on her enviable marriage to fellow actor Christopher Guest.
At 25 years old, Jamie Lee treated Rolling Stone like her own mail-order catalogue. The actress was flipping through the magazine when she spotted her future husband, a stranger to her up until that moment, in its pages. "I'm going to marry that man," she told friend Debra Hill, the producer and co-writer of Halloween, according to a 2004 essay Jamie Lee penned for O magazine.
"That's Chris Guest," said Debra. "He's in a very funny new movie called This is Spinal Tap. I know his agent." Jamie Lee called the agent the next day and left her number for Christopher, an actor and musician with dual American-British citizenship. He never called.
Later that year, Jamie Lee was having dinner with friends at Hugo's restaurant in West Hollywood. So was Christopher. They made eye contact from across three tables. Writes Jamie Lee:
He waved to me as if to say, "I'm the guy you called." I waved back: "I'm the woman who called you." 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.
Christopher called her the next day and they had their first date four days later. A little more than a month later, they had fallen in love. When Christopher joined the cast of Saturday Night Live shortly after, they reluctantly took their relationship long distance. That September, just two months after their first date, Christopher proposed.
"We were talking on the phone," Jamie Lee recounted in her O essay. "'I went for a walk along Fifth Avenue today,' he said.'What'd you do there?' I said. 'Do you like diamonds?' he asked."
Jamie Lee did "marry that man"—six months after speaking her intention. The pair will celebrate their 33rd wedding anniversary on December 18. They share two children, Annie, whom they adopted in 1986, and Thomas, adopted in 1996.
Oh, and that picture Jamie Lee spotted in Rolling Stone? It's still hanging up at their house, Christopher said to The Guardian with a smile.
Though Jamie Lee has written several children's books, don't expect the actress-turned-author to pen a memoir anything soon.
"The only good memoirs tell the truth," she told The Daily Telegraph, "and that means betraying confidences and intimacies. I've had it done to me and it's been upsetting. So I don't believe I would ever do so."
When asked what her secret to a long marriage is, Jamie Lee keeps it simple. "Don't get divorced," she told Today in 2015. "It's a fascinating thing. I could write a book on marriage called 'Don't Leave.'"
She said something similar to Good Housekeeping recently. "There’s a recovery phrase that says, 'Stay on the bus…the scenery will change,'" the actress said.
"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 continued. "I think it can apply to almost anything where you feel unhappy in that moment. I'm not a wild romantic. I'm a realist. I respect him. And I just don't leave."
