The day before this article goes up? My fortieth birthday. Which means I have reached the age where I’m more likely to be cast as a grandmother than a romantic interest. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I am in fact old enough to be a grandmother. My daughter is nineteen. Not, last we talked on the subject, interested in having kids at all, but still. It happens. But so what?
Look, I don’t want to harp on the fact that Robert Downey, Jr., is playing Iron Man while being the same age as Martha Kent and Aunt May, apparently. By itself, I don’t actually think it’s that significant. I mean, Superman was born in 1983 and Spider-Man was born in 1996 (after I’d graduated from high school, I regret to inform you), and people born in 1964 and 1965 are basically old enough to play their parents/parental figures. That’s not the point.
The point is, Robert Downey, Jr., is cast as Tony Stark. Womanizer. Yes, okay, we get the not actually necessary comments about how Aunt May is an attractive woman, which maybe acknowledges that they’re the same age? (She’s actually a little older than he is, but only a few months.) Actually, Marvel has often cast performers of approximately similar age in its romantic entanglements. Natalie Portman is a couple of years older than Chris Hemsworth, while Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell are only a few months apart in age. The biggest age gap is between Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson, and they weren’t initially cast as romantic interests. Though it’s big; he was born in 1969, and she was born in 1984.
But look beyond Marvel. Some time ago, as I’ve mentioned before, I took an online quiz that told you what actress would be cast as you in the movie of your life, and it kept suggesting Meryl Streep. Even when I specified that the person would not be an Oscar winner, it came back Meryl Streep. Who is nearly thirty years older than I am, only a few years younger than my mother, in fact. It was as if the concept that there are maybe women whose ages are between Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence was a foreign concept.
It’s not even just that Sean Connery could at sixty-nine be cast opposite thirty-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones. Given her husband, I’ll cope with that. It’s that it was fine for Maggie Gyllenhaal to be cast as James Spader’s romantic lead when he was forty-two and she was twenty-five but not fine a few years ago, because she was now thirty-seven . . . and he was fifty-five. And she was too old. It’s that Julia Roberts, at forty-five, was cast as the wicked queen in a telling of “Snow White.” Women hit thirty, and the parts they’re offered change.
Women hit forty, and the parts disappear for ten or twenty years for a lot of them.
Times like this, I really wish we’d get back to the era of “women’s pictures.” If there were more movies made for and about women, there’d be room for stories about women Of a Certain Age—that age where it’s considered scandalously rude to ask a woman for it. These days, it seems as though Women Of a Certain Age are all portrayed by Dame Judi Dench or Dame Maggie Smith or Dame Helen Mirren anyway. Apparently, being Of a Certain Age is the same as being British?
Actually, the woman whose career fascinates me most on this subject right now is Lindsay Price. This is because she and I are exactly the same age and were probably born in the same hospital. I know that part of the problem she’s had getting work over the years has been that she shows her part-Korean heritage, and I know she’s had cosmetic surgery to look less Asian, but I wonder if it’s actually harder for her now. Then again, we haven’t seen each other in forty years, so it’s not a converation I’m likely to have with her any time soon.
