A Dish Called Jamie

SPOTLIGHT

"endowed" is theword for Jamie Lee Curtis. Endowed with Hollywood know-how, endowed with a knockout figure that makes her every appearance on-screen seem an adventure in 3-D. But magnetic curves can be a curse. The irony of her career, she says, is that she has been less exploited in exploitation flicks such as Halloween and Terror Train than in mainstream films such as Perfect and Trading Places. (And lost in all this peekaboo is the emotionally exposed performance she gave in Love Letters.) Her latest movie is a long stare down a smoking barrel. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the psycho-killer thriller Blue Steel bloodhounds a commodities trader (Ron Silver) who forms a fatal attraction for a rookie cop (Curtis). Following this ballistics test, she returns to the ABC sitcom Anything but Love, opposite the anxious, motioning comedian Richard Lewis.At home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, Christopher Guest, and their young daughter, Annie, Curtis circulates in sunlight. Their house is adorned with small, casual artwork by Tony Curtis, her father, and a large, spooky photograph by Cindy Sherman of a wigged woman in a long coat. "It reminds me of everyone I know in L.A.," Curtis says, meaning: cool, hidden, unformed. She herself strives for delineation. "I was nothing for a long time and I'm just beginning to define myself." Freeze-frames are for movies. Life is a fluid finding.

JAMES WOLCOTT