Jamie Lee Curtis: Her 10 Best Performances
6. Scream Queens
One of her more recent turns, Curtis played Cathy Munsch in this Ryan Murphy-penned series. The show itself was often middling at best, struggling to find a balance and tone that really worked for it, but Jamie Lee's performance was consistently great.
As Munsch, Jamie Lee got to show off a much more menacing side than audiences had ever seen before. Munsch spent the first season being the Dean of Wallace University, where the sorority Kappa Kappa Tau and all of the numerous Chanels there-in were being targeted and murdered by a mysterious killer. In the second season, Munsch leaves the university and starts a hospital (a fun nod to the original Halloween II), where there is once again a mysterious killer targeting people.
In both seasons, Curtis' Munsch is heavily suspected of being the killer by the characters and the audience, thanks to her cavalier performance. Bodies are falling left and right, yet Munsch treats it as an inconvenience at worst. Curtis plays this to the T, sinking her teeth into some of Murphy's most despicable dialogue with glee.
Honestly, the entire production of the show was more than worth it for Curtis' shower scene in the first season alone. It begins as an earnest restaging of the original Psycho shower sequence before taking an unexpected turn and ending with Curtis getting to kick some well-deserved ass and spit some venomous dialogue along the way. It is genuinely wonderful.