Arrested development
Movies and TV will never grow up when it comes to women, Judith Woods writes.
You know how women claim they become invisible after 50? It's hard to escape the truth of it in film and television, where diversity in race, religion and sexuality are trumpeted and yet the treatment of older actresses remains a shocking blind spot.
Cate Blanchett dryly observed a few years ago that “actresses age in dog years.” British series The Royle Family star Sue Johnston has witheringly observed that, having once been cast as Sean Bean's wife in an episode of Inspector Morse, 30 years later she is playing his mother, in a new BBC drama, Time. There may be an age gap of 15 years or so, but had Bean been older than Johnston, I am sure nobody would have considered him for the role of her father.
An outrage? Maybe, but it's simply business as usual in the entertainment industry. Not so long ago, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal admitted she had lost a part in a film due to her age — then 37. Why? She was apparently too decrepit to play the love interest for a 55-year-old man.
It reminds me of a fabulously scurrilous Amy Schumer sketch featuring Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette called Last F---able Day which looks at the sudden drop in desire for an actress of a certain age. Fey explains that nobody formally tells an actress she's been put out to pasture, but the signs are there:
“You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks's love interest in Punchline and then 20 minutes later she was his mother in Forrest Gump?” The scene ends with Louis-Dreyfus, realizing her days are numbered, being pushed out into the river in a canoe without any oars, smoking a huge cigar.
If only the passage from box office saucepot to sexless frump were always as dignified. Famously, The Graduate starred Anne Bancroft as the “older woman” who seduces Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin. She was just six years older than Hoffman at the time (though at age 30 he was playing a younger character, age 22). It's all very well for industry apologists to point out that these days there are more complex roles across the board for older actresses, which there are, but it's hardly progress if these parts are given to young women.
Aging up for women is already so much par for the course we scarcely noticed anything amiss about Carey Mulligan, 35, playing 56-year-old Suffolk landowner Edith Pretty in this year's Netflix archeology gem The Dig. Her co-star Ralph Fiennes, 58, was cast as the excavator Basil Brown, aged 51.
We also have Viola Davis, Annalise Keating on the Netflix hit How to Get Away with Murder. When accepting her Screen Actors Guild award, she praised her unconventional character, saying, “Thank you ... for thinking that a sexualized, messy, mysterious woman could be a 49-year-old, dark-skinned, African-American woman who looks like me.”
She's 55 now, but presumably nobody has noticed. And even if they do, I'm not sure Davis will be fobbed off with a canoe and a cigar.