Jane Curtin recalls problems with John Belushi on 'SNL'
Jane Curtin was part of the original "Saturday Night Live" cast in 1975. Credit: Invision / AP / Dan Steinberg
“Saturday Night Live” founding member Jane Curtin is remembering her late cast mate John Belushi, the shooting-star comedian who died of a drug overdose in 1982 at age 33.
"I got along with everyone," Curtin, 75, says in this week’s People magazine of the show’s original and other early cast and crew during the NBC late-night sketch-comedy show’s first five seasons, from 1975 to 1980. “But I did have problems with John,” who was as famously wild and Bacchanalian as he was comedically gifted, and who indulged in a variety of legal and illegal substances. "But that was because John wasn't John,” Curtin explained. “He was an addict."
She added, "I had a life — a dog, a husband [art director and producer Patrick Lynch], an apartment with a little garden. It was a life I really enjoyed. … John, obviously, he could party with the best of them, but the next day these guys were just so miserable. Plus, the 90 minutes on the [live weekly] show were so exciting and adrenaline-pumping, I felt all the other stuff was self-indulgent and seemed hard.”
Curtin, a Television Academy Hall of Famer who went on to star in the hit series “Kate & Allie” and “3rd Rock From the Sun,” was more forgiving in her new comments than in past recollections of Belushi, who notoriously believed women should not be comedians.
Belushi "said, ‘Women are just fundamentally not funny,’ ” Curtin told Oprah Winfrey in 2011. “He felt as though it was his duty to sabotage pieces that were written by women.” She reiterated the point to The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, saying Belushi was among “a few people that just out-and-out believe that women should not have been there and they believe that women were not innately funny,” noting, “The rest of the group was fabulous.”
Belushi, Curtin told The New Yorker in 2019, would say to her face “several times” that women were unfunny. She would simply respond, “ ‘Yeah, OK. Whatever.’ I’m not a fighter.” By this time she was acknowledging how drugs had affected her fellow star. “I knew who was dealing the drugs. I’d see this guy in the studio every so often, and I’d think, God, I just want to shoot him. I caught John going through my purse one day. He was in my dressing room, and I just blew up at him. It bothered me a lot. It affected so many lives and careers.”
Curtin stars with Ben Kingsley and Harriet Sansom Harris in the recently released science-fiction comedy-drama “Jules.”
