Losing the beauty of an older woman - Are we so used to airbrushed celebrity glamour that we can no longer see the beauty of an older woman?
By Janice Turner
When Madonna did a recent photoshoot for Louis Vuitton, the unretouched images were mischievously leaked to the press. An unflinching close-up of her face, before the airbrush artist had got to work, evokes a complex mix of feelings. Melancholy: even she who has applied her boundless wealth and energy to holding back time has sagging cheeks, an incipient wattle neck. Pity: how cruel to compare this with the “after” image, the tight, sculpted iconic face.
But finally fury: what is wrong with the strong, still-handsome face of a 51-year-old woman? No doubt Madonna has had a little “work” done here and there, but her face is still a fair reflection of her age, the accumulation of her experience, who she is. More so than the plastic fembot who appears in the campaign. Besides, middle-aged women are more able than twentysomethings to afford £700 Vuitton leather goods. Yet advertisers believe no one wants to buy a bag from an “old bag”.
Madonna has forged a career out of smashing taboos about female power and sexuality, but is not willing to take on the final challenge. To stand up, with her trademark insouciance and say: “Yeah, women age, so what. Here I am!” Instead, as Tina Fey put it in 30 Rock, she clings desperately onto youth with her “Gollum arms”.
The untouched image of Madonna would fit well into a photographic exhibition to be launched at the National Theatre, called Infinite Variety. It features images of women aged 48 to 95 and is curated by the actress Harriet Walter, who is appearing there in Thomas Middleton’s bloodsoaked drama Women Beware Women. Fittingly, her character Livia, a scheming aristocrat, reveals how the iniquitous treatment of older women is a timeless theme. In the play a 55-year-old Duke marries a 16-year-old girl promising status and wealth in exchange for sex. But when Livia offers the same deal to a lush young man, she faces public disgust. One is reminded immediately of Madonna and her 23-year-old lover Jesus Luz.
The exhibition, could not be more timely: older women broadcasters are rising up against the assumption their faces are repellent to viewers when they pass a certain age. After the sackings of Selina Scott, Anna Ford and Strictly Come Dancing judge Arlene Phillips, Country File presenter Miriam O’Reilly, 53, is suing the BBC for making her and three female colleagues of similar age redundant to be replaced by a younger woman. Meanwhile, older male colleagues kept their jobs.
In Infinite Variety we see plenty of characterful older faces, both actresses — including Vanessa Redgrave and Phyllida Law — and ordinary women, since Walter believes ageing is something “we are all in together”. But shouldn’t we be asking why women are perpetually judged by their physical appearance? Walter says she wasn’t trying to pretend wrinkles and grey hair are as sexy as youthful looks, but to break down disgust about ageing women.
“I think it is still important to broaden the range of what is beautiful,” she says. “What I am trying to put into the show is an inner light in these women, something about how they’ve lived their life. I want older women to feel happier in their skin and younger ones not to worry that the only fate ahead is the surgeon’s knife.”
Walter turns 60 this year, an age she describes as the “foothills of being properly old”. Yet with her trim, poker-backed classical actress’s frame she looks dashing on stage in her bustled red velvet dress.
“Older women complain that they can no longer turn a head,” she says. “Well, I don’t have instant beauty, but if you talked to me for half an hour you might get interested and start to see my face differently. It’s about animation, not just the texture of the skin. Now I look at people on the Tube and I think all of them are beautiful.”
Juliette Binoche once said that “actresses, ultimately, are responsible for the faces we give to women”. But now “civilian” women, as Liz Hurley calls us, have started to resent celebrities who, with their devotion to dieting and surgical procedures, have raised the bar to unattainable levels. Today it is acceptable to admit you are 50, but not to look it.
“Well,” counters Walter, “actresses like me are often not allowed to give women their faces.” She speaks of contemporaries who struggle to get any work. It is a view echoed last week by Juliet Stevenson, Gemma Jones and Lesley Manville, who accused writers of only creating parts for “nubile” women under 30. “All the executives are male,” said Stevenson. “They are chasing young skirt.”
But this is a perpetual lament from actresses. Maybe this disgust is too deep rooted and anthropolgical to overcome: attractiveness is so connected with perceived fertility, which seems why men — potent until much later — are forgiven for getting older. As Martin Amis once said “45 for women is an animal birthday”. Well, says, Walter drily “We have overcome our prejudices in other areas with our evolved intellects, so why not this one. We no longer drag women into caves by their hair, for example.”
If we stop being so repelled by ageing faces, we will bear to see them on TV, maybe then the experiences of a whole strata of the population will be told. “That is what upsets a lot of women: that my story doesn’t count. I play a small part on TV and I think “why don’t we focus on my character? She could be very interesting.” But they don’t. You’re just a function of the plot and that is very hard to swallow. And yet when you put a camera on anyone for 90 minutes, it is so intimate, you will fall in love with that person. It is just we are less likely to do that with an older woman.”
The problem is, Walter explains, women are cast in relation to men. A male detective can be anything between 40 and 55: but his wife or daughter must then fit a narrow age band. Also since drama is about conflict and responsibility it has been dominated by male figures and domains. “But now,” says Walter, “there are lots of arenas in which women are taking major decisions.”
And there is cause for optimism that film studios have realised older women will pay to see themselves on screen, will turn out in gangs to watch Mamma Mia or Sex and the City. Meanwhile, this year’s Baftas went to women playing middle-aged politicians: Rebecca Front as a minister in In the Thick of It and Julie Walters playing Mo Mowlam.
Moreover, when Harriet Walter rang her Los Angeles agent, to discuss working in American TV, joking that she’d obviously have to get a facelift first, he replied, “no longer”. Walter says: “He said it is becoming a problem shooting these faces which look so odd, they have to work out special camera angles. We were always taught at drama school that if you think something, it is reflected in your face. Surgery irons that out. You can’t do the often very minute expressions you need to do on screen. And facelifts homogenise people.
“We like to see real women’s faces on screen. Not just women but men too. I’ve never met a man who likes plastic surgery.”
Walter says she notices when friends have a little procedure. “I’m not a fascist about it. I sometimes think, oh, clever old you!”, but abhors the knife herself. It helps, she says, that she was never cast for her beauty, was accustomed as a young actress to see big parts go to more gorgeous near-contemporaries such as Greta Scacchi. And now she has crossed through from the tricky thirties and forties, when actresses are struggling to remain youthful, into the more forgiving territory of late middle age.
Indeed Walter, who has never married or had children, but lived for many years with the actor Peter Blythe until his death in 2004, has found herself a new man.
She won’t name him, but says he’s an American stage actor, a year her senior. “We met when I was doing Mary Stuart on Broadway. So he saw me looking like Elizabeth I. I said to him, ‘I may be the queen on stage but I’m not in the bedroom!’” She guffaws. They live on separate sides of the Atlantic but communicate for hours by Skype.
“The thing that younger women don’t understand,” she says, “is most of us don’t want to be younger. I am having a good time and my life is positive. I still dress well and have a sex life. What I want to say is it is not a crime or a shame to age. It is a fact. Let’s stop running away from it.” If only Madonna was so brave.
