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Jamie Lee Curtis says turning 65 is a moment of ‘excitement.' Here's why

The Oscar winner is a longtime advocate of embracing the aging process

Jamie Lee Curtis is totally at ease at this point in her life.

The Oscar winner, who turned 65 last November and is out with a new children’s book called “Just One More Sleep,” said she is loving her age on TODAY Jan. 16.

“Sixty-five is a moment of reflection and excitement,” she told Hoda Kotb.

“So, for me, I feel more excited, more turned on creatively. I have a new book. I’m heading to go make a movie. I got to be in a TV show. I’m having a creative time.”

Curtis says she has come to a point where she sees her own personal evolution.

“I’m much less hard on myself,” she said. “I’m very much in acceptance of what I look like and I own what I think and feel. And that, to me, is what maturity is. You own what you think and feel. I say what I mean. I mean what I say. I try not to say it mean. And that’s a way then to grow into my old age.”

Hoda was awed by the notion of saying what you mean and meaning what you say without being mean about it, prompting her to ask Curtis when she became comfortable with that idea.

“Yesterday,” Curtis responded while laughing.

The “Halloween” star then said “it’s all about the future” when people have children, but that eventually changes.

“The present is very hard because they’re growing,” she said. “You’re thinking about new shoes, new clothes, dentists, schools, things. Everything is the future. And when you’re my age, that isn’t — you’re not thinking about the future because the future means you’re going to be dead,” she joked.

“I mean it. What it means is that you’re very much more in the present moment.”

She said she remains focused on the here and now.

“I’m here and I’m really happy to be. And that’s really what to me 65 has yielded,” she said.

Curtis is no stranger to voicing her take on aging.

Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images
Jamie Lee Curtis on Tuesday, January 16, 2024.

“This word ‘anti-aging’ has to be struck,” she said in March 2022 at the Radically Reframing Aging Summit hosted by Maria Shriver. “I am pro-aging. I want to age with intelligence, and grace, and dignity, and verve, and energy.”

“I don’t want to hide from it,” she added.

Curtis has also passed on her views about aging to her daughters, Annie and Ruby.

“Don’t mess with your face,” she told TODAY in October 2022 about her advice to them.

“I did plastic surgery,” she added. “I put Botox in my head. Does Botox make the big wrinkle go away? Yes. But then you look like a plastic figurine.”

She also said she tries to serve as a model for them.

“Walk a mile in my shoes. I have done it. It did not work. And all I see is people now focusing their life on that,” she said.

Last year was a watershed year for Curtis, who won her first Oscar for her work in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” She said she had been around long enough to know the value in appreciating what she had accomplished.

“My goal in life now as an old lady is just to say ‘Relax, you are enough. You are enough. This is a perfect moment right now. Call off the search. Just relax,’” she told E! on the red carpet before the ceremony.

This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:

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