I’m fed up of being told I look good for my age, says Kristin, 59
DAMe Kristin Scott Thomas refuses to say ‘thank you’ when someone compliments her on looking good for her age.
The 59-year-old actress, said she is tired of the assumption that women ‘fade away’ after they reach 50.
‘I’m fed up of having to say “thank you” when someone says I’ve still got it,’ she told Radio Times.
‘Ageing is a quality for women. We don’t just fade away. I don’t put up with any bull**** any more. I’ve never been happier.’
The celebrated star of The english Patient and Four Weddings And A
Funeral was last year praised for her description of what it means to be a woman during her cameo in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.
Her character Belinda was a businesswoman who said that ‘ women are born with pain built in’ and that their ‘ physical destiny’ is ‘ period pains, sore boobs, childbirth’.
‘I’m super grateful to Phoebe for articulating my own personal frustration with the way women are treated as they age,’ she said.
The actress, who was appointed the honorary president of the Women’s economic Forum last October, will star in Phedre at the National Theatre this year as well as taking on the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers in an upcoming Netflix adaptation of Rebecca.
Dame Kristin said she started to turn down roles after decades of being expected to play ‘hard but fragile’ on screen. Fellow thespian Maxine Peake has also lamented limited roles available to women, and criticised the assumption that ‘women act personally, men act politically’.
Miss Peake, 45, has taken matters into her own hands to write a play for BBC Radio 3, Only Mountains, in which actress Lyndsey Marshal plays Pearl, a woman who joins an all-female militia fighting in Syria. ‘Men who go to fight for a cause are seen as heroes, while women are seen as naive and idealistic,’ she told Radio Times.
‘And be it telly or film or theatre or whatever, a woman only does something because she’s driven by some event in her life – because she’s lost a child, or she was raped, or her mother died – but a man acts because he’s a man... and that drives me mad.’
‘We don’t just fade away’