Jamie Lee Curtis, who played my wife, Maggie, in an almost forgotten television movie about organ donation, once told me she was as proud of her performance in it as she was of anything else in her career. This week on her Instagram page she said the subject was “haunting, honoring and humbling.”
The movie is Nicholas’ Gift, a true story, and in it she plays the mother of our seven-year old son, Nicholas, whose organs and corneas we donated after he was shot in an attempted robbery during a family vacation in Italy in 1994. I don’t see how anyone could watch it and remain indifferent to organ donation.
The seven recipients two years after their transplant with the Greens and their three children. Left to right standing: Reg and Maggie Green; Andrea Mongiardo (heart); Francesco Mondello (cornea); Tino Motta (kidney); Anna Maria di Ceglie (kidney); Eleanor Green. Sitting: Laura Green, Maria Pia Pedala (liver), Domenica Galletta (cornea), Silvia Ciampi (pancreas cells), Martin Green. Photo included here by permission of Oggi magazine, Italy
Given that she has starred in a variety of blockbuster movies in the last forty years and amassed a string of awards — most recently the top Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021 — her assessment is an extraordinary comment on a movie that is rarely-mentioned nowadays in the United States, although it has been seen by 100 million viewers worldwide.
Reg Green
The Nicholas Effect 