Editor’s Note: Reg Green, a frequent guest writer for Colorado Boulevard, remembers how Jamie Lee Curtis is off-camera.
Jamie Lee Curtis speaking at the 2018 San Diego Comic Con International (Photo – Gage Skidmore)
The first words Jamie Lee Curtis said to my wife were “I hope I won’t let you down, Maggie.”
By Reg Green
She spoke those words as she was about to play Maggie, the mother of Nicholas Green, in a made-for-television movie; Nicholas was a seven-year-old California boy who was shot while on a family vacation in Italy. He was also my son.
I can’t think of any other superstar who would have had the unpretentiousness and sense of involvement to say anything like that. As the mother of two adopted children, Nicholas’ death was a knife in her own heart. Yet she was able to discipline her anguish into a performance that earned her a nomination for an Emmy.
The movie, “Nicholas’ Gift,” was based on our decision to donate his organs and corneas to seven very sick Italians, four of them teenagers. It was made in 1998, four years after Nicholas was killed, and it is still being shown worldwide. It has been seen by around a hundred million people, including forty million in the United States. Les Moonves, then CEO of CBS, said it was the network’s ‘crown jewel.’ In the movie, I am played by Alan Bates.
A few days ago, Jamie told me she is as proud of her performance in that role as anything else in her career. Deservedly. I don’t think anyone watching her working her way from the horror of the shooting to the quiet determination to save the lives of total strangers could remain indifferent to its message of selflessness. It was just how Maggie dealt with it in real life.
On a street in Rome two or three years after the movie was made, a stranger came up to me and told me he was an extra in it. ‘We were all expecting a bigshot Hollywood star, but every day she ate in the canteen with the rest of the cast,” he said.
The genuine article? You bet.
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