If THIS is what 81 looks like, count me in!
ON the very day a survey revealed more than a quarter of women over 50 claim to feel invisible and are subject to daily ageism, up popped octogenarian Jane Fonda on the cover of British Vogue.
The actress is celebrating her age — 81 — in the way only she knows how. By looking utterly glamorous and totally magnificent.
In an accompanying interview, she reminds us that older women are the fastest-growing yet least-represented demographic in the world.
‘It’s time to recognise our value,’ she says. ‘I’m fond of age. I’m glad I lived this long.’
I never thought I’d find myself in the same camp as the woman once known as Hanoi Jane for her antiVietnam War antics.
Her Left-wing politics could not be further from mine, while her enthusiasm for plastic surgery I find faintly abhorrent.
But on this subject I couldn’t agree with her more.
What a dazzling champion for older women she is — contemptuously staring age in the face in her ninth decade. It is her irrepressible defiance that’s won me over — ironically the very qualities she showed throughout her years as a political activist.
Yes, she’s a rich Hollywood star, one of the Fonda dynasty who’s always had money to help keep her looking beautiful. Yet isn’t there something marvellous about the way this former sex-bomb — so sensuous in Barbarella — simply refuses to cave in to the ravages of time. As a feminist, she has of course championed the MeToo brigade. But she’s done so by taking on, in feisty style, the sleaze merchants of Tinseltown, while never playing the victim herself.
She’s never moaned about her tragic upbringing: a cold and distant father who only came alive in his movie roles, and a mother in and out of mental institutions before committing suicide when Jane was 12.
When her three marriages all ended in divorce, she joked she had a boob job with each decree nisi to make her feel better about herself — before admitting it didn’t help one jot. It was an admission that strangely made us warm to her.
The truth is that it’s not just money and surgery that have kept her looking so good. She’s also worked hard at it, exercised ruthless selfdiscipline and kept herself super-fit — let’s not forget all those Eighties work-out videos — and maintained her self-respect.
Jane Fonda’s a tonic for all older women who thought they were over the hill. As she says: ‘It’s never too late — never too late to start over, never too late to be happy.’