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Since a trip to Ethiopia in 1985 during the famine, Curtis has also devoted much of his time and energy to charitable causes: Co-foundingfor years and helping create organizations like Make Poverty History and more. Decades of work has helped raise more than $2 billion and supported over 170 million people.
On Sunday he’s being celebrated for those efforts by. Getting an Oscar is especially exciting for Curtis who remembers as a teen having to wait until the night after to watch the broadcast in the U.K.“I’ve been excited by their existence for 50 years,” he said. “This is particularly a special award, but it’s not work for which one expects praise or needs praise. So it’s very lovely.”
Curtis spoke to The Associated Press about his second career, the state of romantic comedies andsecond act. Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.
CURTIS: No, it’s been one of those cascading things. I have always found that if you create a sort of venue for generosity, the public reaction is so often astonishing. When did this first TV show, we thought we’d make £5 million, but we made £15 million. The next year we made £27 million. I would have had to be a monster not to continue with it. I thought it was going to last a year. Instead, it’s lasted a lifetime.
CURTIS: We have a younger generation that is very passionate about issues of gender and diversity and climate. There’s a more sophisticated understanding of how you solve problems and change things. A lot of it is about giving power to people on the ground. And particularly since the pandemic, it’s important to go on pointing out how much difference a small amount of money can make abroad and at home.They moved on to Guadalajara, where they got work at the airport doing security, but they were approached by drug smugglers there and so they quit and headed north to Tijuana.
They have been sleeping on a blow-up mattress on top of folded up cardboard boxes so they don’t get soaked when rain enters through the gaps in the shelter’s flimsy roof and soaks the floor. Morazan has been bitten by bed bugs and wears a diaper when the shelter’s bathrooms become so fetid they make her want to vomit. The couple worked briefly collecting recyclables at a dump.“We hope the United States opens its door because we won’t last here,” Juarez said.
One night a fellow migrant sleeping in a tent at the shelter was struck in the neck by a stray bullet from a shootout that erupted in the ramshackle neighborhood.“There are cartels here and a lot of crime,” Juarez said.