A male friend of mine was recently approached by a line of thirtysomething women at a party. He’d just interviewed Juliette Binoche and they were desperate to learn if the actress truly was “the most beautiful woman in the world”. To which he replied, with a yawn: “Well, she was all right, given that it was pretty early in the morning and that she’s basically past it.”
He was joking, but only sort of, and the group shivered as one. Binoche may not be everybody’s idea of heaven (I’ve always thought her the smuggest of Cheshire cats), yet, at 37, she still gets to play leads, she still gets to play sexy. The unspoken horror was this: if Binoche isn’t good enough, what actress (or woman) past 35 is?
It’s a Hollywood truism that male stars hit their stride at just the same time (mid-30s) that things start to go south for their female colleagues. Crowe, Connery, Gibson, Ford, Hopkins, Douglas, Clooney, Spacey, De Niro, Eastwood, Nicholson . . . they’re admired for their brio and wit as much as their looks. Any signs of wear and tear – little bellies, thinning hair, puckering mouths, yellowing skin – are seen as endearing.
With women, by contrast, a perfect, bedroom-friendly body is still the bedrock of their appeal. That and a juicy mouth and/or child-like gaze. In other words, we love Nicholson for what he is, we love Michelle Pfeiffer for what she was. And it’s the same with any number of sassy, snappy icons, from Sharon Stone – currently unable to find a co-star for Basic Instinct II – to Demi Moore, from Ellen Barkin to Kathleen Turner, from Geena Davis to Bridget Fonda. Like a crack in a golden bowl, age in a luscious woman distracts us from the matter in hand. At some point, reality’s bound to come trickling out and we anticipate the gross intrusion at every turn. So when Rene Russo pops up with Pierce Brosnan it’s hailed as a small miracle. And, more generally, De Niro, 57, gets teamed with Natascha McElhone, 30, or Nicolas Cage, 37, with Penelope Cruz, 27. It’s simpler that way.
For the same reason, it’s easier for women to start a career at 35 than sustain one (as far as their looks are concerned, the expectations just aren’t as great), but even late bloomers like Helen Hunt, 38, and Julianne Moore, 41, rarely have their following tested. You wonder if Cast Away could have been made with either of them in the lead role. A dreadlocked, make-up free woman playing with a volleyball for two hours? Somehow I just can’t see it. As for the rest, they don’t disappear as such. Like the poor, they’ll always be with us – they just start to loiter with discontent. Their fate is either to be heard and not seen (Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore now spend half their time doing the voices for animated features) or be seen and not heard, whether as moms or variations on the evil queen.
And such piddling fare takes its toll. Once you’ve seen a star looking saintly in a cardie or cackling into her padded bra, the horrid image is hard to shake. It’s a strange fact that actresses actually do seem older than their male equivalents. Kathleen Turner and Denzel Washington are the same age. So are Meryl Streep and Richard Gere. So are Mimi Rogers and Tom Hanks. But in each case, the woman in the pair carries an extra patina of dust.
No wonder so many actresses try to buy a little more time in the land of the living. Jennifer Jason Leigh insists she was born in 1962, though the records suggest it was 1958. Early interviews with Rachel Weisz suggest she was born in 1970; these days it’s 1971. But who wouldn’t put off getting older, when the only way forward is down? As Village Voice critic Amy Taubin points out: “Godard said movies were about a girl and a guy – he didn’t say woman.”
It’s when you look at the career of someone like Binoche that you realise how bad things have got. “Exotic” Europeans, for some reason, get away with more than their US counterparts. Binoche is one of the few actresses around consistently to be cast as a sexually desirable woman opposite men younger than herself. In her next project, The Assumption of a Virgin, which tells the story of Lucrezia, the nun who inspired fifteenth-century painter Fra Lippi, it’s Oscar winner Benicio del Toro. Producer Carolyn Choah says she always had Binoche in mind, even though Lucrezia was 24 when she met and modelled for Lippi. She chose Binoche “because she has that freshness but she’s also a proper, mature woman – the qualities she is able to convey on screen are not age-dependent”. That used to be said about American actresses. Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis were stars way past their forties – Crawford made Johnny Guitar when she was 50 – but that ain’t the way it is now.
Is anyone or anything particularly to blame? This generation of male directors grew up with feminism and, in most cases, would want to see themselves as sympathetic to the female cause. Ang Lee is a case in point. Remember that brilliant party scene in The Ice Storm where two buddies watch a woman walk through the door, only for one to mock-whisper to the other: “Wish she’d brought her daughter!” The Ice Storm explores, rather than exploits, a weakness for nubile women; Lee’s latest, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, does the same.
Lee is still with his first wife, Jane Lin, but not all directors are so willing to be seen with women their own age. Members of an altogether different club include Jack Nicholson, Billy Bob Thornton, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Mike Figgis and Michael Winterbottom, who has just left his wife and children for the 21-year-old actress Sarah Polley. So the films they make do reflect reality – their reality. Frances McDormand and Annette Bening have decent careers right now. Might that all change if their partners – Joel Coen and Warren Beatty – were to move on?
Women directors can hardly be relied upon either, certainly not American ones. Amy Taubin is particularly caustic on this subject, noting for instance that Amy Heckerling (Clueless, Loser) “is still making coming-of-age movies though she’s now over 40 herself”.
Casting agent Mary Selway says there’s no point looking for help from directors – it’s the writers and producers who hold the key because “they’re the ones who initiate the projects”.
She’s appalled, in particular, by the rise of the action movie: “All this macho shit goes on in our society and it echoes throughout the films.” It’s a convincing argument. Glance at a list of the big movies coming up this year – The Planet of the Apes, Lord of the Rings, Pearl Harbor, Jurassic Park 3 – and you notice that the oldest woman involved is Tea Leoni at 35. That comic-strip adaptations like The X-Men featured only young women was predictable too. Geared to the teenage boy in us all, blockbusters want to keep anyone vaguely resembling Mummy out of the picture.
But even in romantic comedy, a supposedly female-friendly genre, the same double standards apply. Hugh Grant starred alongside Andie MacDowell and Kristin Scott Thomas in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Seven years later, he’s still playing an object of desire in Bridget Jones’s Diary. It’s a different story for MacDowell and Scott Thomas. As far as Selway is concerned, female audiences are accountable, too. “If women said, ‘We ain’t gonna go unless you make films that reflect our lives’, something might get done.”
Not surprisingly, many actresses aren’t prepared to wait that long. Instead, they’re turning to independent cinema. Andie MacDowell, for one, will be appearing in the enticingly named Sad Fuckers Club, aka A Certain Age, produced by Channel 4 Films. Glenn Close is set to star in Rose Troche’s The Safety of Objects. At this year’s Sundance festival, Sissy Spacek and Stockard Channing were the belles of the ball. So Hollywood doesn’t want them; who cares?
And for those not prepared to give up on the popcorn-munching crowd, there’s always the do-it-yourself option. A lot of actresses simply want to gain more control over “the product” and, in order to do so, are setting up their own production companies. True, the results often resemble vanity projects (Sandra Bullock’s Miss Congeniality tiptoes to mind), but this is Hollywood we’re talking about – the issue isn’t art, but power. And some of the films pencilled in, like The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, produced by and starring Jodie Foster, actually sound good.
All eyes, then, are on the future and one longs for a crystal ball to see how those actresses right on the cusp – Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta Jones, Cate Blanchett and, of course, the thirtysomething of the moment, Julia Roberts – will cope with being “past it”, given that they’re so brimming with confidence now. Roberts has said in the past that the only Pretty Woman sequel she’d be in would involve her 60-year-old self pushing an 80-year-old Gere in his wheelchair, seeing a slope, letting go of the chair and inheriting all of his money… but would such a movie ever get made or will Roberts herself end up playing fade-to-grey moms?
Or, even worse, the sort of women given to shrieking: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” It’s a question that can only end in tears.