CALL ME NAUGHTY!
Why Jenny Agutter still feels sexy at 66 (and loves her wrinkles)
SHE may play a nun on TV – but in real life Jenny Agutter believes the key to old age is being naughty.
At 66, she has proclaimed she finds growing older ‘liberating’ and feels sexier than ever.
She said she is embracing her ‘naughtiness’ and insists women should ‘enjoy’ their wrinkles as a sign of a happy life.
Miss Agutter stole the hearts of millions with her roles in the likes of Walkabout, The Railway Children, Logan’s Run and An American Werewolf In London.
And although her looks have changed since then, she’s not concerned. ‘I have lines, lots of them but do you know what, I don’t mind,’ she told Good Housekeeping, where she appears on the cover in a scarlet gown.
‘We should all enjoy every line we’ve got on our faces, because we’ve earned each one.’ Miss Agutter, who has been married to Swedish hotelier Johan Tham for nearly 30 years, said that she used to fear turning 60 but is actually loving her current decade.
‘Sixty was such a defining line for me; it seems to put you in an “older” phase of your life’, she explained. ‘Then it happened, and I thought “Just forget it.”
‘I’ve found a kind of freedom in my 60s; I feel liberated. I’ve started to forget about having to be a certain way, having to make up for the fact that there’s a hell of a lot of stuff I don’t know and I’m enjoying life instead.
‘I’m getting on and doing the stuff I want to do.’
The star – who plays Sister Julienne in the BBC1 drama Call the Midwife – said older women used to be seen as unfashionable and frumpy, but that these days women were sexy well into their older years. ‘Age expectations have certainly changed,’ she said. ‘When I was growing up there was a “twinset and pearls” age that you go to: women hit middle age, cut their hair short and got their cardigans out.
‘That’s just not the case any more. Look at someone like Tina Turner, who’s both extraordinarily attractive and an extremely sexy person. She’s carried on being sexy right into her 70s! It’s about having a sort of naughtiness and an enjoyment of things.’
The Bafta-winning actress, who has a son Jonathan, 28, said she would never go under the knife and instead chooses to embrace growing older gracefully. ‘I’m too squeamish for cosmetic surgery’, she said. ‘I’ve also seen the results of it and the forms that people have signed; you’ve no idea what’s going to happen while you’re under anaesthetic. If there was a new invention that guaranteed to keep your muscles doing what they should, that would be a different story.... sign me up!’
Miss Agutter starred in The Railway Children in 1970 – memorably waving colourful underwear to warn of a landslide – and the following year appeared in Walkabout, playing a teenager left to survive in the Outback with her young brother.
In 1976’s Logan’s Run, her character Jessica 6 donned a shimmering barely-there tunic, and in 1981 she provided the love interest as a nurse in An American Werewolf in London.
The full interview appears in the June issue of Good Housekeeping, on sale today.
‘I’ve found a kind of freedom’