At last, older actresses have become Hollywood’s hottest property
They used to say there were no good roles in Hollywood for women over 40. In 1989, when that moment arrived, they had to make an exception for Meryl Streep.
But times have changed. We’re living through a rare golden age for older actresses thriving, not one of whom is the chameleonic Streep in disguise. In fact, were you to clock the forthcoming attractions at this year’s Venice Film Festival, you might be taken aback by a paucity of roles for women under 40 – so dominant is the star power of these veteran divas.
Already, industry legends have been sauntering off vaporetti and bedazzling the world’s press corps. One such is 49-year-old Angelina Jolie, who plays Maria Callas in the final years of her life for Chilean director Pablo Larraín, in the biopic Maria. Two more are Catherine O’Hara (70) and Winona Ryder (52), reunited as the same temperamentally ill-matched mother and daughter we last saw them play 36 whole years ago in Beetlejuice.
All signs point to a thrilling new longevity in the screen careers of our female stars. Take the indefatigable Nicole Kidman, who at 57 is showing no indication of either slowing down or pivoting to sexless roles. Kidman’s last romantic pairing isn’t far back down memory lane: it was in this summer’s Netflix romcom A Family Affair, alongside Zac Efron, who is 20 years her junior.
Undaunted by that kind of age gap on screen, Kidman has only just gone and increased it by a decade. Her Venice contender Babygirl is a racy-looking contemporary erotic thriller, in which she plays a high-flying CEO who has a forbidden fling with an intern, played by 28-year-old Harris Dickinson.
In the past, we couldn’t move for age discrepancies in cinema, but it was always the men who were older – Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson or Robert Redford, most likely. Kidman has flipped the script on all that, as a luminous Annette Bening also did opposite Jamie Bell, when she played Gloria Grahame in the underrated Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017).
Kidman and Bening (now 66, and Oscar-nominated this year for playing a veteran swimmer in Nyad) are among the leading lights of that generation, making it entirely good and right that they haven’t been coerced into closing up shop. Another pair of stalwarts are Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, both 63, who will be walking the red carpets too next week: they co-star as old friends reunited in Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, The Room Next Door.
These actors have all kept up a steady work rate beyond the wildest dreams of those who flourished in (say) the 1960s. Consider someone like Goldie Hawn. Her character in The First Wives Club (1996), a faded Oscar-winning actress (eep!) whose husband has traded her in, gets the film’s best quip: “There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.” Hawn was only 50 when she took that part, but she proved the point: her subsequent leading roles could be counted on one hand, with fingers to spare.
Alternatively, ponder the disappearance of Debra Winger, who was everywhere in the 1980s, got three Best Actress nominations, but then reached the end of the line in 1995. “I stopped reading scripts and stopped caring,” she admitted. She now makes spiky cameos when you ask very nicely. Winger was exactly 40 at that time, and would become the named subject of a 2002 documentary by Rosanna Arquette, Searching for Debra Winger, which explored this very phenomenon of actress burnout.
A generation later, if we tried to imagine Cate Blanchett calling it quits at the same age (i.e in 2009), it would be an awful wasteland of opportunities missed. We would be saying goodbye to her Oscar for Blue Jasmine (2013), the stunning coup of Carol (2015), and the tetchy field day of Tár, which won her Venice’s Volpi Cup for Best Actress two years ago. You could play much the same game with Viola Davis, now 59, who has only become a star over her last two, indispensable decades.
At 55, Blanchett is back on the Lido to unveil Disclaimer, a seven-part Apple TV+ series written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. If you’re not excited to see her play an investigative journalist famed for exposing others’ misdeeds, who finds her own darkest secret aired in the pages of a novel, you simply haven’t been watching Blanchett at work.
It isn’t just the career of Streep, who has picked up two-thirds of her 21 Oscar nominations since the age of 40, which has been revolutionary. After being pressured to retire, Michelle Yeoh just blew us all away in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Frances McDormand has now won Best Actress twice in her sixties (for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Nomadland).
The first of those two was significantly timed. It was right in the thick of Hollywood’s moral audit around #MeToo, just months before Harvey Weinstein’s arrest. McDormand, one of the film world’s least abashed feminists, gave an all-timer of a rousing acceptance speech, coaxing every female nominee in the room (not just the actors) to stand with her and fight for greater inclusion from the industry. Symbolically, she did all this having set her Oscar down and given him a little pat on the head.
Was this a sea change? Not in and of itself – more a rallying cry. But the casting-couch practices Weinstein had made so notorious would, of course, be rigorously scrutinised during his trial. Hollywood’s toxic disdain for giving opportunities to older women has since been exposed to an equally unforgiving spotlight. That’s the entire subject of The Substance, an outrageous, sickening body-horror satire which premiered in Cannes this May, giving 61-year-old Demi Moore a mighty comeback. She was the toast of the Croisette and is now firmly on the Oscar trail.
If we’re judging by Academy plaudits, it might take meteoric advances in human life expectancy for anyone to match that Streepian record. (Ever.) But there are other pathways to becoming a doyenne. Agents might egg on their clients to Do A Dench, rising to global fame only when they’re past 60.
Dame Judi was 64 when Mrs Brown (1997) – acquired by Weinstein’s Miramax, somewhat ironically – established her as a bankable film star. That means there’s plenty of time for, say, Lesley Manville (68) to catch up: her sleeper hit Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (2022) did really nicely, grossing $31m worldwide from a $13m budget. Seedlings are firmly in place for Emma Thompson (65) to have the glorious late reflorescence we all want.
Who else? Helen Mirren (79) is by no means done. Sigourney Weaver (74) could really do with an elusive Oscar if anyone’s paying attention, but eight-times-unlucky Glenn Close (77) would surely fight her to it. Meanwhile, in her first-ever leading role, 94-year-old June Squibb just got her own back on a phone scammer in the comedy-drama Thelma, which travelled a healthy distance from Sundance to reach enthusiastic audiences. A two-star review from, ahem, the Telegraph was but a minor roadblock.
It’s hard not to take inspiration from these achievements: after all, the idea of entering one’s prime as a nonagenarian can only bring hope to us all. Perhaps we should be paying due attention to the hair of, say, Jamie Lee Curtis at 65 – who’s just completed shooting on Freakier Friday for next year. Scrap “golden age”, then: it’s a shimmering silver one, and long may it last.
