She has run from Micheal Meyers and been dubbed the original Scream Queen, so which hand would she have used to take on these classic horror villains?
Jamie Lee Curtis is right-handed just like a large chunk of the world’s population where 85-95% of people are righties. She signs autographs and writes with her right hand. She even wielded a butcher’s knife with her right hand in the 1978 film Halloween. She was only 20-years-old.
Scroll down to read more about how right and left-handedness are perceived, the ways Jamie Lee Curtis shows her right-handedness and the handedness of her family.
The Perception of Handedness
While most of the world’s population is right-handed, there are a select few people who are lefties. As mentioned above, Jamie Lee Curtis is not one of those few people.
Since there is this disparity in the world population concerning people’s dominant hands, some psychologists have decided to study the way lefties and righties are perceived in the public eye. While for a long time, left-handed people were considered touched by the devil, some have been curious to see if that negative connection to lefties still exists.
In 2016, Natalie Jacewicz at The Altlantic interviewed the University of Chicago psychologist Daniel Casasanto about his work on the perception of handedness. In the interview, they went over some pretty interesting findings.
Casasanto didn’t seem to find anything about there being a bad perception of left or right-handed people in general. He did find that people tend to use their non-dominant hand for negative gestures.
His research has also found that people have a tendency to associate positive attributes to creatures who are photographed more towards the side of their dominant hand.
As he said in the interview “On average, righties attributed more positive qualities to the alien creatures they happened to see on the right, while lefties preferred the creatures they saw on the left.”
Another interesting thing that his research has found is concerning the positive ranking of words that have more letters on the right side of a keyboard. The general population tends to give a word a more positive rating if it has more letters on the right side of the keyboard.
Talk about a total side bias. It makes sense though considering a very high percentage of the population is right-handed.
Casasanto’s research has clearly proven that in general there is a very large bias towards right-handed people.
So what about the Prom Night actress Jamie Lee Curtis, does she do any of the things that are common in right-handed people?
Jamie Lee Curtis is Right-Handed
As mentioned above, the original Scream Queen is right-handed. Interestingly enough though, she has a tendency to use her left hand a lot while talking and interacting with other people.
You can actually see her using mainly her left hand while talking in a video that she did with Vanity Fair where she breaks down her acting career over a timeline. You can watch the full video from Vanity Fair below.
In this regard, Jamie Lee is going directly against the research that Daniel Casasanto presented. She is using her non-dominant hand to talk about her acting career which she must view as a positive in her life.
Looking at any clips from her movies though, you can see Curtis using her right hand to do the classic things that anyone would use their dominant hand to do. She shakes hands with her right, she writes with her right, and she even threw water in her hair with her right hand in True Lies.
Handedness of Jamie Lee Curtis’ Family
Jamie Lee Curtis’ husband, Christopher Guest, is right-handed as well. You can tell that he is because he uses a right-hand guitar in This Is Spinal Tap.
Jamie Lee Curtis isn’t the only one in her family that is famous either, she was born to celebrity parents Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Jamie Lee had an on and off relationship with her father after her parents divorced until his death in 2010.
As far as handedness goes, Tony Curtis was right-handed.
Curtis’ mother was also a bit of a famous horror film actress, having starred in the original Psycho film that was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960. Janet Leigh was also right-handed.
Finally, Jamie Lee also has an actress sister named Kelly Curtis. Kelly is the elder of the two sisters and they are very close to each other. She also appears to be right-handed.