Jamie Lee Curtis won the best supporting actress Oscar on Sunday for her role as an IRS auditor bearing down on a Chinese American laundromat owner struggling to clear her taxes in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
It was the first Academy Award for Curtis, 64, his first Oscar nomination in a 45-year career in film, which debuted with the horror film “Halloween.” She dominated the other front-runners, Angela Bassett and Kerry Condon.
Two weeks earlier, Curtis had won the same award from the Screen Actors Guild and said in her acceptance speech that when she got the call for a “weird” film and heard she would be working with lead actress Michelle Yeoh, she was ready.
As frumpy Internal Revenue Service auditor Deirdre Beauberdre, Curtis latches onto Yeoh’s character Evelyn at the tax office before the film turns into a multiverse action adventure replete with martial arts battles. Nevertheless, in one of the verses, Evelyn and Deidre sport fingers that look like hot dogs and bond as Evelyn tries to convince him that she is loved.
The daughter of famed Hollywood actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Curtis has jokingly referred to herself as “Nepo Baby,” but is known in Hollywood for her lack of pretension.
Some of her best-known films include the original “Halloween” in 1978 and its seven sequels, “Trading Places,” “A Fish Called Wanda,” “True Lies” and “Freaky Friday.”