How Getting Fired From a Sitcom Made Jamie Lee Curtis into a Scream Queen

There were Scream Queens before Michael Myers came home to Haddonfield to terrorize Laurie Strode. Fay Wray in King Kong, Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein, and Janet Leigh in Psycho all sent shrieks echoing across movie theater walls. But no one has done it better than Janet’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, who played final girls not just in Halloween and its many sequels, but also Terror Train, Prom Night, and more.

And it almost never happened. Because of Operation Petticoat. No, not the 1959 comedy that starred Cary Grant and Jamie Lee’s father Tony Curtis. Rather, it was the 1977 television series based on the film. Curtis played Army nurse Lt. Barbara Duran for one season on Operation Petticoat, before getting fired as the show retooled for season 2 – a firing that made way for Halloween.

In a new Variety profile, Curtis recalled her feelings of dejection after getting cut from the series. She drove home to her “shitty little apartment, thinking, ‘Oh, fuck, I’m gonna have to move home. I’m gonna have to go back to college!'” But not long after, Curtis heard about a low-budget horror movie being made by a new director named John Carpenter, and decided to audition.

“If I hadn’t gotten fired,” Curtis admitted, “I would have never auditioned for Halloween, which then became something important, right? And then the rest of my life happened.”

It’s easy to see why Halloween initially failed to impress. We know the 1978 film as a horror classic, almost single-handedly responsible for popularizing the slasher subgenre and launching the career of both Carpenter and Curtis. But back then, the movie co-written by Carpenter and Debra Hill was indistinguishable from any other exploitation flick of the era.

In the same way that she didn’t recognize the potential of the movie that would become Halloween, Curtis doubted her own ability. In an oral history celebrating the film’s 40th anniversary, Curtis remembered getting a phone call after work one day and thinking it spelled her doom. “I remember this slow walk over to the phone and doing that thing of like, ‘Um, hello?'” she said. “He’s from Kentucky, I believe, and he was like, ‘Hey, darlin’, it’s John. I just wanna tell ya how happy I am and how fantastic you were today. I just know it’s gonna be amazing.'”

Of course, Carpenter was right, about both his movie and his star, who has gone on to an impressive career that spans far beyond horror, and even a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

But it’s Laurie Strode that will be Curtis’s defining role. In Halloween and its first sequel, Laurie set the standard for all final girls that followed: smart and resourceful (and, as is often forgotten, willing to smoke pot and interested in sex). Even though her Laurie has died several times, first off-screen before Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and later in regrettable fashion at the start of Halloween Resurrection, Curtis continues to revive the character, most recently for the trilogy made by David Gordon Green.

Curtis didn’t get the chance to make audiences howl with laughter on Operation Petticoat, but her scream as Laurie will continue to echo for generations.