The 95th Academy Awards took place last Sunday, 12 March at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The most coveted ‘Best Picture’ award went to the sci-fi adventure film Everything Everywhere All at Once. Jamie Lee Curtis played the role of Deirdre Beaubeirdre in the flick, for which she racked up another victory for the film, in the Best Supporting Actress category.
Understandably, she was very visibly gleeful to take questions from the press corps backstage.
One of the questions came from a Hungarian reporter, attending the event online.
She asked ‘can we consider this at least a semi-Hungarian Oscar?’, to which Curtis jokingly replied, ‘oh yeah, the lower half’. She then went on to sing a version of a children’s song starting ‘Katica, Katica’ (‘Ladybug, Ladybug’), and ended the interaction by saying ‘I love my Hungarian heritage’.
Jamie Lee Curtis’s father is the late American actor Tony Curtis, best known for his film roles in the 1950s, such as 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success or the 1958 comedy Some Like it Hot. He too is an Academy Award nominee, having been up for the Best Actor award in 1959 for his work in the 1958 film The Defiant Ones. However, he was bested at the time by David Niven in Separate Tables.
Tony Curtis’s father was a Jewish-Hungarian man named Emanuel Schwartz, born in the small village of Ópályi in Eastern Hungary. The young Tony, despite being born in New York City, New York in the United States, only spoke Hungarian until age six. No wonder his daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, is very much aware of her Hungarian ancestry.
Evidently, she was asked about other topics as well in her post-award show press brief.
She talked about female representation among Oscar nominees, something she feels strongly about, and said would like to see more women nominated. When asked if she thinks her aforementioned father and her mother are looking down proudly at her, she confessed she does not believe ‘in a world where there are a bunch of people looking down on us’, rather, she believes she ‘is them’ and ‘a product of them’, and that they would be unbelievably proud of her.
