Crowe’s comments to an Australian magazine have been called “sexist claptrap”
Actresses in their prime may recognise the following call from their agent: “Darling, just heard back from the studio about the cheer leader love interest role. They’ve decided to go in another direction. Really, I’m as devastated as you are. But chin up. That Canadian co-production still hasn’t cast the teen babysitter with eating disorders. Reckon it’s got your name written all over it. Ringing the director now. Byee.”
Or that would be a typical scene, if the world of showbiz accorded to Russell Crowe’s vision.
In an interview with Australian media, the 50-year-old actor and director declared that the lack of work for female actors over 40 is their own fault. Apparently, actresses with years of professional experience decline “age appropriate” roles in a desperate attempt to hang on to youth.
“To be honest, I think you’ll find that the woman who is saying that is the woman who at 40, 45, 48, still wants to play the ingenue, and can’t understand why she’s not being cast as the 21-year-old,” Crowe said.
‘Functional granny’ roles for actresses
Crowe’s remarks are incendiary and ignorant. They ignore the huge body of evidence by respected actresses that work is harder to get as you age. Goldie Hawn famously remarked that there were only three ages for women in movies: “Babe, DA and Driving Miss Daisy.”
BAFTA-winning Julie Walters despairs at being offered “functional granny” roles. “It’s worse for women, but men suffer it as well. I don’t just want to play a functional granny; drama needs to be about a character going through something. I suppose the people having the dramas in life do tend to be younger, but I think that’s changing.”
Meryl Streep seems to have a foot in both camps. The 65-year-old, currently in cinemas as an ancient witch in Into the Woods, said: “It’s good to live in the place where you are.”
But the exceptionally beautiful, and by all accounts wonderful to work with, Streep lives in a more exalted place than most actresses. And even she complained of being sent an avalanche of evil witch roles by Hollywood the day she turned 40.
Cult of youth: pressure to lie about their age
With first-hand experience of the way on-screen roles marginalise female characters past the first flush of youth, it is unsurprising that actresses hang on to young roles for as long as they can.
Some even report pressure by agents to conceal their true age, so they can delay the constriction of work offers that mid-life brings.
Even by their late 20s, actresses can find themselves thrown out of the charmed youthful circle. A friend of mine auditioned for the age-appropriate role of ‘girlfriend’ in a big West End musical, and was offered the supporting role of mother instead.
She took the part, because she needed the money. But she now worries that by playing nearly double her real age she has condemned herself to a lifetime of grey wigs and exaggerated under-eye circles, nose-to-mouth lines and frowns.
So when Crowe says “if you are willing to live in your own skin, you can work as an actor”, he is not talking about living in a female skin.
Women’s roles are more narrowly defined, and the pressure on actresses to be prematurely aged explains the counter movement to try to be perceived as young for as long as possible.
For an example of how differently mid-life male and female actors are treated, look at the film of Blake Morrison’s autobiography When Did You Last see Your Father. Colin Firth, then a young buck of 46, played the dashing lead, while Juliet Stevenson, a whole four years older at 50, was cast as his aged mother!
So Crowe’s assertion that “If you are trying to pretend that you’re still the young buck when you’re my age, it just doesn’t work” applies far more stringently to women than to men, whose screen ‘buck years’ go on for decades, or half centuries in the case of Jack Nicholson.
The arrogant male assumption
Crowe’s “age appropriate” remarks have caused so much anger because they represent men feeling that they have the right to deliver memorial lectures on subjects where they lack experience or expertise, but still expect their view to dominate.
It is in the same category as the Prime Minister’s “calm down dear” put-down to Angela Eagle: dismissive of the life stories of others (non-males), as if they do not count.
Actress Jessica Chastain summed up the flaws in Crowe’s argument best: “I think there are some incredible actresses in their 50s and 60s who are not getting opportunities in films. And for someone to say there are plenty of roles for women that age – they’re not going to the movies enough.”
Julianne Moore , 52, wins Best Actress at the Golden Globes
Crowe need only look to Sunday’s Golden Globes for a demonstration of Chastain’s point. Julianne Moore, 52, won Best Actress in a Drama. Other award nominations included Patricia Arquette, 46, Julianna Margulies, 48, Viola Davis, 49, and the awesome Robin Wright, 48.
Even more educative for Crowe than a trip to the multiplex this spring would be a week at the West End theatre.
At the Barbican, Juliette Binoche plays ancient Greek rebel Antigone; Emma Thompson is cannibal pork pie maker Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Kristin Scott Thomas takes on the role of the Queen in The Audience, and Penelope Wilton takes on the Nazis as Irmgard in Taken at Midnight. Young bucks need not apply
Given that only 17 per cent of Shakespeare’s roles are for women, the theatre is making great progress in showing what can be done in creating real age-appropriate roles for females. Perhaps the days when women were shoehorned into playing artless ingenues, lacking any real power, because they were the only roles available, are fading. We can but hope.