Anne Curtis on longevity, balance and playing the long game

Who, indeed. In the limelight, Curtis remains one of the Philippines’ most enduring cultural icons and “Asia’s Sweetheart”, a moniker she earnt through decades of mainstream appeal and relatability. 

Larger than life, the realness of Anne Ojales Curtis-Smith lies in her oft barefaced presentation on social media, the freckles she decides to leave unretouched, the bushy brows and unruly baby hair she keeps untamed, and the fact that all my interview questions were answered on the spot sans the pre-meditated safety filter of management.

Raised alongside younger sister Jasmine, also an actress, between Australia and the Philippines, Curtis is the daughter of the late Australian lawyer James Curtis-Smith and Filipina homemaker Carmencita Ojales. She married restaurateur-turned-content creator Erwan Heussaff, with whom she shares a daughter, Dahlia Amélie, now central to her life off-screen. 

“She likes tennis, she loves science and she’s into those little toy artefacts that you can excavate,” reveals Curtis. And just like her mother, Dahlia loves singing and dancing. What if she were to follow in her mother’s footsteps? “You know, Erwan and I spoke about this. It’s good to do your art. If she wants to go to the UK for drama school, I’d completely support that, but I’d love for her to really study it first. I would never say, ‘No, go be a doctor’. I wouldn’t do that to her.”

In the same breath and as a mother, she speaks with a new kind of awareness, one that brings her back to her past. “I wish I listened to my mum a bit more,” she admits with a laugh. “Now that I’m a mum, I can only imagine what it was like.”

She entered the industry at just 12 years old, at an age when most decisions are made for you. Early on, she moved within the structures set by management and family, committing to a decade-long contract with VIVA Communications, Inc that would lay the groundwork for her career.

Even then, and within that framework, there was a growing sense of self. “Even before the 10 years were up, I was already able to take hold of my own narrative,” asserts Curtis. “I knew what I wanted. I knew what rules I wanted to abide by and what direction I was going.”

That clarity, she admits, wasn’t always so adroit. It included missteps—some of them public, amplified and unforgiving. She recalls one particularly notorious controversy (her infamous “I can buy you, your friends and this club” line) that led her to retreat from social media entirely for months on end. “Even if VIVA knew the truth… it made no sense to deny it, because no one was going to believe me anyway,” she says with a shrug. “But they stuck by me for 29 years. And I stuck by them.”

“I think it’s having the strength to follow your own narrative and not being controlled,” she reflects. “That’s what’s kept the passion burning inside of me. It never felt or feels like a job.”

See more: Movie review: ‘The Loved One’ asks who we become in a relationship—the lover or the loved one?

Her star wasn’t born of a singular moment because of a lucky breakout role, a well-timed scandal or because somewhere along the way, she sold her soul to the devil. 

As cliché as it sounds, Curtis’ iconicity was built through her unshakeable ambition, sheer hard work and all the quiet unseen tenacity in between. Her career expanded not through calculated diversification, but through alignment with her interests at the right moment. “The thing is,” she starts, “throughout the length of your career, you’re gonna have hits and misses, right? It’s inevitable. You just can’t be heartbroken about that. You just keep on going until you find what works for you.”

Says Curtis, “I’ve always used this tagline about dreaming big, because if you work hard for them, they can actually happen, and I hope to show that through my life. But you can’t just sit around and wait for [them to happen], you have to work hard for them.” 

Professional persistence aside, however, she does hold onto a couple of special pinch-me moments.

The first was when she had her first Box Office hit, No Other Woman. “It was a camp film, but it did well. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is actually happening! It was so exciting’.” Another was her Annebiyosa: No Other Concert in 2012. “I remember asking them, ‘Is anyone here? What if no one comes?’ And then the moment the stage cover opened, and I was on a microphone… [it was a] full house! Imagine seeing the arena packed with all the lights and everything…I was so nervous, I almost forgot to sing!” 

A major ‘I've made it moment’ for Curtis, she goes on to share that “It was something I didn’t think people would have accepted, knowing that I’m not a singer. I can carry a tune now, but back then, it was horrible. I did an album, and I’d do concerts. I tried to do a world tour…it was hilarious! So, happily, I’m forever grateful to the people who supported me, and even to VIVA for producing that album for me,” she finishes, and with that disarming signature self-deprecating giggle, she cheekily adds: “I was representing that one per cent of Filipinos who can’t sing.”

Long before the beauty campaigns, the billboards and becoming one of the country’s most photographed faces, a confident teenager first walked into the Beloclinic, not for vanity, but to seek treatment for bacne. It was a trifling entry point for one of the original “Belo Babies”, yet it marked the beginning of a decades-long relationship that would mirror her own evolution. Says Curtis, “They’ve been a big part of my puberty era and until now, through womanhood.” 

A self-professed “non-invasive girly,” she jokes that she has become ‘Belo’s non-invasive guinea pig,’ trialling the latest in painless, no-downtime treatments, while adding the signature Belo Beauty Cocktail that delivers exceptional skin quality.

“Tita Vicki [Belo] made me try it and there's an instant glow…I just look like I have my best skin ever. Like, give me this treatment all the time. The beauty cocktail is a must!” Anne assures. "BJ [Pascual] just did it. And I think Georgina [Wilson] is booked for it.”

As one of the highest-grossing Filipino actresses, her films have earnt over PHP1.8 billion collectively. Her accolades include FAMAS Awards, Metro Manila Film Festival wins and multiple Box Office Entertainment Awards, alongside recognition from Forbes Asia and Tatler Philippines as Most Stylish, as well as a wax figure at Madame Tussauds Hong Kong in 2024. 

Recently, she marked her 41st birthday while celebrating the box office success of The Loved One and preparing for her Netflix project BuyBust: The Undesirables, proving that her acting career is far from over.

Beyond acting, she has built a business empire with BLK Cosmetics and remains a UNICEF Philippines advocate. “BLK just fell in my lap at the right place, at the right time,” she recalls. “I had tried to do makeup before on my own, but it didn’t work out. Then I met my partners, and everything just happened,” she says, before adding, “There’s always something new to try out. That’s why your creativity kicks in—because you’re not complacent.”

If the early years of her career were defined by momentum—projects, visibility, stacking the achievements—her current chapter sees her leaning more into what it truly means to be discerning. 

“It’s been a pretty crazy early quarter of the year—good and bad,” she says candidly and with the ease of someone who has learnt to hold contradictions without immediately needing to resolve them. Professionally, the pace has been relentless. Her recent film The Loved One exceeded expectations at the box office, while BuyBust, a project three years in the making, inches toward completion with a global release on Netflix. “We still have a week to shoot,” she adds. “But now I think I’m ready to take a little bit of a rest and listen to my body.”

“Before, having so many projects left and right would mean success to me. But now, it’s being able to say, ‘Actually, I’m going to take a rest’.” This shift didn’t happen overnight. It was earnt through experience, and, at times, exhaustion. She recalls a period in her career when she realised she was missing out on life beyond work—friends, family, even the simple act of doing nothing.

There is a certain power in knowing you don’t have to take every opportunity that comes your way. It’s a lesson she embraced early on, and one that has since defined her path. “I used to be such a workaholic,” she admits. Since then, she has made it a point to take a month off every year. “That’s the discipline. Knowing when you need to stop.”

Curtis occupies a rare albeit hyper-visible vantage point. But for her, influence has little to do with scale and everything to do with connection. “It’s always about paying it forward,” she says simply. “It’s being able to reach out to people, people being able to relate to you and being able to make a difference in people’s lives,” she says. “It’s not just a superficial thing online.”

She recounts personal encounters with fans that have stayed with her over the years. Encounters that remind her that what she does extends far beyond the screen. “It makes me realise what you’re doing is not just about you and your success.” That perspective, she postulates, was shaped early on by her father’s advice, which has taken on an even deeper meaning in the wake of his passing last January.

“You never know what someone is going through and how that smile can change their day,” she says, recalling his words. “It stuck with me my whole career. It’s so relatable that, like, that smile can mean so much to someone because you don’t know what they're going through, right? And maybe that smile can mean so much to someone and make a huge difference. So, even more so now, going through [my own] grief, it means so much to me.”

For all she’s achieved, Curtis resists the idea of a calculated legacy. “I’ve always used this tagline about dreaming,” she says. “If you work hard for them, they can actually happen.” Through her work with organisations like UNICEF and her own foundation, Dream Machine, she has extended that message beyond aspiration into action—often without fanfare.

And as for the future? It remains, as ever, open.

There may be more children. There may be travel with Erwan and Dahlia during the school break. But the point she so wants to get across is that it’s not for her to predict and materialise what comes next; it is to meet whatever comes her way with the same joie de vivre that has defined her journey thus far.

There is no rigid narrative of reinvention, no calculated pivot points designed for applause. After all, the long game is not about rushing toward an end. It is about knowing when to move, when to pause and when to simply be. And Curtis, it seems, has mastered all three.

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