OLDER, & SEXY SELF-CONFIDENT
More women are having relationships with younger men, but society still gasps when the age gap is wide
When it comes to the dating game, Mrs. Robinson is not only alive and kicking, but she is sexier and more self-confident than ever before, according to actress Helen McCrory.
Women of a certain age are keeping their looks and still feel sexually attractive, she said.
In her latest film, the U.K.-released Flying Blind, the 44-yearold actress plays an older woman in love with a younger man. And she believes that the current fascination with the topic is a case of art imitating life.
Married for five years to Homeland actor Damian Lewis, McCrory claims that the rise of the so-called “cougar” — think of the U.S. sitcom Cougar Town, featuring a divorcee in search of love — has been fuelled by changing attitudes.
“Literature is reflecting what is happening in life,” she said in an interview with The Observer, a British paper. “More and more women are having relationships with younger men. It’s partly that women are not losing their figures now. They no longer feel it inappropriate to be sexual at 40.”
But society needs to become more accepting of large age gaps when the woman is older than the man, she added. More than 40 years after Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson famously seduced a young Dustin Hoffman as Ben Braddock, there was still a “deeply sexist” attitude in which older women were treated differently from their male peers in the same situation.
The actress, who is two years older than her husband and has starred in Skyfall and the Harry Potter movies, complains that eyebrows have been raised about the 20-year age gap between artist and director Sam Taylor-Wood and her husband Aaron Johnson, when no notice is taken of the “hundreds of men” dating younger women. But the taboo surrounding the subject is exactly what makes such relationships good material for a movie or TV drama, she said.
In her new film, she plays Frankie, an astrophysicist obsessed with a Muslim student young enough to be her son.
The mother of two said that her character’s loneliness is partly the result of her exceptional intelligence. For that reason, she points out, she would not wish her own children Manon, 6, and Gulliver, 5, to be top of their class at school. “Why would anyone want their children to be the brightest?” she said. “Academia is a lonely world.”
McCrory has said that she is looking forward to hitting 50, as that is when a woman reaches the “pinnacle” of her femininity and womanhood.
Despite being happily married to Lewis, who won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Sgt. Nicholas Brody in Homeland, she said she still receives a lot of male attention — mostly from younger men.
The actress said she believes that older women are increasingly “hot,” having swapped the cardigans and twin-sets of the 1950s for diets, the gym and a great wardrobe.
“There’s not that, ‘My God, there’s such a difference between a 20-year-old and a 40-year-old,’ ” she has said in a previous interview.
Last year McCrory starred in Tony Marchant’s televised U.K. drama Leaving as a married mother sexually obsessed with a younger colleague.
She received letters from older women thanking her for the “refreshing” risqué scenes in which she starred.