At 45, Jamie Lee Curtis says she's finally worked out how to wear her hair and would never want to go back to being a teenager.

But she talks to Steve Pratt about new movie Freaky Friday, which sees Curtis taking on a comedy role reversal with a difficult teenage daughter.

JAMIE Lee Curtis knows how to make an entrance. She enters the room making a performance of carrying a cup of coffee, informing everyone that she's determined not to spill a drop on the journey to her chair. Then she surveys the sun streaming in through the window of the London hotel and declares it's a present from Southern California - "a gift from Arnold Schwarzenegger to you all", she declares, referring to her True Lies co-star and newly-elected governor of California.

She can afford to be in a good mood. Her latest movie Freaky Friday, in which she plays a mother who changes places with her rebellious teenage daughter, has broken the $100m barrier at the US box office. The success is a surprise. The last thing Curtis expected was to be starring in a film "I thought that was over and I was moving on to other things. Then this weird set of circumstances fell into place," she says. "I'm writing books for children now and have found great success doing it. A woman of 45, who has never particularly been in the higher echelons in the shakedown of the hierarchy, was the last person who was going to headline a movie." She's intelligent enough to know it could have been very different. She wasn't the first choice for the role, only approached when the original choice dropped out days before shooting began.

Curtis, after appearing in films such as Hallowe'en and A Fish Called Wanda, was enjoying what she calls the "psychological freedom" of accepting herself for what she is "with all my bumps and foibles". Then she did photographs for a magazine article about a book on self-esteem for children and those, she reckons, are what Freaky Friday producers saw when they were looking for a replacement. As the mother of daughter Annie - who celebrated her 17th birthday this week - and seven-year-old son Thomas, she's well qualified to play a mother. Not that she's going to spill any secrets about her own daughter's reaction.

"I would not out her to the international press without her permission," she says. All she will say is that her daughter is notoriously difficult to get out of bed and that she's attempted to wake her in many of the ways the mother in the movie tries to get her daughter out of bed. Curtis, daughter of Hollywood stars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, says she was a model teenager, unlike her screen daughter.

"I was a really good girl. I was not rebellious at all," she says. Given the chance to swap, she'd like to assume the identity of performers who can communicate through song as she's not a good singer. She's musical, and listens to music a lot, and would love to stand up in front of the press and sing rather than talk. But she assures us she won't be on Top Of The Tops next week or gigging around town.

What she does believe in is the advice to make good choices that the Freaky Friday mother gives her daughter. It was a line Curtis improvised. "It's the mantra in my house because life is about choices," she says. "Very few of us are forced to wear what we're wearing and do what we do. Being a parent, you are hoping your kids are making the right choices."

She's aware that she and her husband - actor-director Christopher Guest, who made Spinal Tap and is an English hereditary peer - are not the coolest parents. "My husband is very quiet. I'm not," says Curtis. "The combination of that doesn't make us the coolest parents. We are open-minded and willing to acknowledge our complete failure as human beings."

As you can tell, being serious is not something that comes naturally to Curtis. But being a parent has made her aware of how difficult it is being a teenager today. She wouldn't want to be a teenager again, mostly because of the uncertainty as you develop a sense of yourself and your body changes drastically.

"They are constantly uncomfortable. That's what I wouldn't want, the uncertainty," says Curtis. "I've finally figured out what to do with my hair and I'm 45. If you look at people and see the evolution, people finally figure it out. But I didn't for a long time."

Being a teenager today is very challenging, she continues. Not least because of the sexually-charged imagery with which they are bombarded in videos. "It's everywhere. I'm terrified kids are getting these images and don't know what to do with them. That stuff, when I was growing up, we would have called porn." Having children, she's had to open her mind to things she never thought she'd have to think about. She was worried about the repetitive viewing of the images of 9/11, wondering what watching the destruction of the Twin Towers over and over again would achieve. "We don't know what repetitive viewing of the carnage does to people," she says.

What has changed is that she's allowed a private life. In her mother and father's day, they had to open their doors at Christmas and have pictures taken with their children. Curtis feels she's allowed to tell photographers to "sod off". "I think you're allowed to say, 'this is me here and there that's me there - and that me there is off limits. That wasn't the case with my parents' generation. I have a very private life." Given the plot of Freaky Friday, you wonder with whom she'd like to swap places. Nobody, it appears. "I don't think I'd want to be another celebrity. I'm very happy being me. I have worked hard to figure out what I am. I have no interest being anyone but myself and that's a miracle considering where I began."

* Freaky Friday (PG) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 18/12/2003