Jane Fonda looks ageless – and that’s not a compliment
As someone who recently had a make-up artist, stylist and Telegraph photographer show up at Pearson Towers to extract your columnist from her dog-walking clothes, lick her into shape and generally try to turn her into something worthy of gracing a magazine, I am all for the over-fifties looking fabulous. Even if Himself did a double-take at this contoured, airbrushed, cantilevered version of his life’s partner and said, eyes narrowed in suspicion: “Good grief, darling, what’s THAT in aid of?”
Anyway, it was with heightened appreciation that I watched the Emmys and saw the older broads on the red carpet socking it to their younger sisters. Not for nothing was it hailed as “the night the over-fifties nailed it”.
Susan Sarandon, aged 70, was both sassy and elegant in an off-theshoulder, long-sleeved royal blue dress. Michelle Pfeiffer – how the hell can she be 59? – was exquisite in black lace Oscar de la Renta. Nicole Kidman, who turned 50 in June, was ageless in a scarlet full skirt that would have made anyone else look like one of those dressing-table dollies my Welsh aunties used to crochet.
It was a heartening sight. Hollywood is not exactly known for its courtesy to middle-aged women. You might say that female stars’ ages are a lot like dogs’: every year an actress spends on the planet is equivalent to seven for a man. There were gasps, four years ago, when Monica Bellucci was named as a Bond Girl. How daring to cast a 50-year-old in a sexy part, albeit one who looked like a goddess carved out of sorbet by Michelangelo! No one mentioned that Belluci’s co-star, Daniel Craig, was 47. Because, at 47, an actor can still play a “young” leading man, while his actress equivalent can basically start crocheting dollies and stocking up on incontinence pads.
Even what Liz Hurley once called “civilians” – women who don’t have to do an annual bikini shoot and, therefore, would not regard six raisins as a treat, as poor Liz does
– are affected by the pressure. No wonder the anti-ageing industry is predicted to reach a jaw-dropping $216.52billion by 2021. (No need to worry about your jaw dropping, madam; New York plastic surgeons have seen rising demand for “the Ivanka chin”.)
But where does it all end? On the red carpet, with Jane Fonda in a Barbie-pink column dress with Barbie fringe and hairstyle to match, I’m afraid to say.
Fonda looked as though the intervening 37 years had barely laid a hand on her. I don’t mean that as a compliment.
The hair, lent lavish, preternatural volume by extensions, gave her more than a flicker of My Little Pony. The figure was as athletic and enviable as it was when she starred opposite Robert Redford in Barefoot in the
Park. In 1967. Through the taut, rather eerie mask of her face peered the famously lovely blue eyes she got from her father. Was this really a 79-year-old woman we saw before us? It was both an awesome sight – Mother Nature defeated by the surgeon’s art and superhuman willpower! – and a sad, rather freakish one.
Yes, I do realise that the approved reaction of the right-on sisterhood in such cases is to punch the air and say, “You go, girl!” But Fonda doesn’t make me feel that way. Not at all. I think of all those years when she reported being depressed as the malleable plaything of powerful, abusive men. I think of her father, Henry Fonda, towards the end of his life, starring opposite Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond with Jane playing their daughter. Hepburn was 74 then. Still with that delicate bone structure and wonderful top-of-themilk skin, but recognisably, proudly old. You can’t imagine Hepburn buffed and trussed like Fonda at the Emmys, pretending to be anything other than her authentic, brilliant self.
I think also of Fonda and Redford reunited recently for a Netflix drama, 50 years after Barefoot in the Park.
Guess who’d had the facelift and who got away with looking their age? I once interviewed Redford and asked if he would ever consider having work done. He smiled, scooped up the wattles beneath his chin and pulled them behind his ears. For a few seconds, I glimpsed one of the most beautiful men that ever lived. Then he laughed and let his face fall back into place. He said it would be too weird looking so much younger than his contemporaries. I think he meant it, but then he was allowed to; he was a man.
Jane Fonda claims that the role in her life that has made her happiest is being Grandma. You would never guess that to look at her. We say that someone looks comfortable in their own skin; this almost-octogenarian looks uncomfortable in skin that is barely her own.
I’m not saying I’m nostalgic for that time when menopausal women were expected to adopt a drab wardrobe that reflected their waning powers of attraction. When my grandmother was the age that I am now – in housecoat, zip-up bootees, grey perm – she was old before her time. Any woman over 40 who seemed to be enjoying herself was met with the reproof: “Mutton dressed as lamb.”
We should be glad that women have burst through those limitations, and refuse to go into their twilight years in shades of beige. But there is a danger that the philosophy “Old is the New Young” brings a punishing tyranny of its own. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,” said Shakespeare’s Enobarbus of Cleopatra. It’s a matchless declaration of love, but getting old is surely part of that infinite variety. If you don’t mind, I prefer my almost-octogenarians to look as lovely as Mary Berry, not Jane Fonda.