Jamie Lee Curtis Knew She Would Marry Christopher Guest Before She Even Met Him
At 25 years old, Jamie Lee Curtis 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 Curtis penned for O magazine.
"That's Chris Guest," said Hill. "He's in a very funny new movie called This is Spinal Tap. I know his agent." Curtis called the agent the next day and left her number for Guest, an actor and musician with dual American-British citizenship. He never called.
Later that year, Curtis was having dinner with friends at Hugo's restaurant in West Hollywood. So was Guest. They made eye contact from across three tables. Writes Curtis:
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.
Guest 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 Guest 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, Guest proposed.
"We were talking on the phone," Curtis 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."
Curtis 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.
When asked what her secret to a long marriage is, Curtis 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.'"
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