Female Celebrity and Ageing

Back in the Spotlight

Deborah Jermyn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415832366
• eBook ISBN: 9781134924936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Female Celebrity and Ageing: Back in the Spotlight interrogates the myriad ways in which celebrity culture constructs highly visible ideologies of femininity and ageing, and how ageing female celebrities have negotiated the media in a variety of industrial, historical and national contexts. In the era when the 'baby boomers' have started drawing their pensions, the boundaries of what constitutes 'old age' have never seemed more fluid, and ageing has never been presented by advertisers and marketers in a more dynamic fashion.

However, the fact remains that ageing is still widely feared, and growing old is an inherently gendered process, in which ageing women are paradoxically both rendered invisible and subjected to damning scrutiny. Nowhere is this conflicting state of affairs more evident than in celebrity culture, where ageing female stars are praised for 'growing old gracefully' one moment, and condemned for 'letting themselves go' the next, when they fail to age 'appropriately'. Examining a variety of themes and ageing women in the spotlight, from Barbara Stanwyck to Madonna to Charlotte Rampling, the essays collected here forge new critical and conceptual insights into how women grow older in the media, and the implications of this for what Susan Sontag memorably called "the double standard of ageing".

This book is based on a special issue of Celebrity Studies.

Introduction: ‘Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming back’: ageing, ageism and the lifespan of female celebrity

Deborah Jermyn
Department of Media, Culture and Language, University of Roehampton, London, UK

I want to open this collection with a question. When does a woman become an ‘old woman’? Or if that is too sweeping, too crude, then when does a woman become an ‘older woman’? In fact, the latter question is no easier to answer. Because of course, we are all, by the simple virtue of living and breathing, becoming ‘older’ all the time. By the time you reach the end of this chapter, you’ll be older than you are now, in chronological terms at least.

Today we live in an ageing population where the boundaries of what counts as old appear to be shifting all the time – 40 is the new 30, we’re regularly told; 50 is the new 40, and so on. A recent television advert for ‘Age Re-Perfect Foundation’ by L’Oreal illustrates this nebulous landscape well, as a vibrant Jane Fonda is seen carefully choosing an outfit and delighting in applying her make-up, before peeking through her window to glimpse a man outside, evidently waiting for her during what we now understand to be her preparation for a date (www.youtube.com 2011). Such ‘girling’ of older women is both symptomatic of postfeminist culture and indicative of a wider move to push back the boundaries of ageing; now in her seventies, this ageing woman star is figured as being just as excited – and just as entitled – to be going out on a date as a woman or girl a fraction of her age might be.

I open with these thoughts in order to underline the inescapably subjective nature of what this collection is concerned with, that is, the intersection of ageing, gender and (female) celebrity. As Susan Sontag notes in The Double Standard of Aging: ‘[A] woman of “a certain age”, as the French say discreetly . . . might be anywhere from her early twenties to her late fifties’ (1972). Since Sontag waswriting, the blurring of ageing parameters has become even more manifest (across genders) as the commercial potential of older consumers has become more significant. This shift has gained momentum as average life expectancies in numerous nations have increased, along with what is known as ‘active lifespan ’; the ‘babyboom’ generation, figured as reluctant to give up their quality of life, are entering retirement; and more recently at a global level, the economic downturn has meant people are expected to draw salaries for longer as retirement ages are raised.¹

Today, ventures such as the Saga group in the United Kingdom speak to an older (financially secure) audience in ways which assume them to be active, vital, still passionate about life and new experiences, just like L’Oreal’ s Jane Fonda (note of course how her ‘successful’ ageing is explicitly tied to her consumerism and use of the right products ‘exclusively designed for mature skin’). Within this apparently changing culture, a select circle of stars like Helen Mirren and Julianne Moore are recurrently held up as exemplary instances of ageing femininity and seem to continue to reach new heights, to become more celebrated, more accomplished, the older they get. Looking at their career trajectories, age really is ‘just a number’ it seems, while Hollywood appears, finally, to be learning to embrace its older women stars. Interviewed in Vogue’s annual ‘Ageless Style’ issue in 2009, Moore commented, ‘Whenever you ask anybody, Would you want to be 20 again, invariably they go, “No” . . . It’s great to be 48’ (Wood 2009, p. 163). But while such sentiments have become commonplace, they are also something of a smokescreen, in part because they project ageing only in terms of a kind of extended middle age, evading thinking about what Julia Twigg has called ‘the more challenging territory of deep old age’ (2004, p. 71). Putting the Saga marketing and the Mirrens and the Moores aside for a moment, we live in a culture where youth is still revered, envied, fought over and – again, as Sontag described – ageing, and particularly ageing women, widely feared.

In the inaugural edition of Celebrity Studies journal published in 2010, Chris Holmlund opened her essay on the then 55-year-old action cinema star, Jackie Chan, with the declaration that, ‘Assessing ageing is one of the key tasks confronting celebrity studies today’ (p. 96). For Holmlund, reflection on the place of ageing within the machinery of stardom has evidently been a significant absence in scholarship on celebrity. But beyond this quite specific arena, it is apparent that the same kind of negligence can be found right across film, media and television studies. The lack of such work does a particular disservice to women in a culture where the ‘value’ ascribed to them is so intrinsically tied up with youth, or accomplishing the illusion of it. In fact, we might say there is something of a parallel to be found, between the elision or invisibility of older women across many aspects of the media and public life, and their neglect within precisely the critical fields which one would expect to be addressing this absence. While ageing studies and gerontology are increasingly established areas of the academy within the social sciences, when one looks at the existing broad terrain of screen and cultural studies, aside from the work of a few notable scholars such as Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, the general disregard shown to age as a significant constituent of identity is striking. ²

This is especially so given that feminist work has long since cautioned against conceptions of ‘woman ’ as homogenous (e.g. at the level of ethnicity, class or sexuality). Indeed, writing in 1999, Woodward argued that ‘ageism is entrenched within feminism itself’ (p. xi), noting that the preoccupations of second-wave feminism tended towards ‘issues that are associated with the earlier years in the life course’ (ibid.). This state of affairs has clearly not shifted with the advent of third-wave feminism, the discourses of which centre largely on the lifestyles and ‘choices’ of younger women. Rather, a ‘generationalism’ has emerged in which older women, and the second-wave feminism they stand for, tend to feature primarily as outdated antagonists to this younger generation. In tandem with the popularisation of such postfeminist discourses, celebrity culture has grown exponentially, often via platforms and formats which seem to privilege youth, as well as the notion of competition between older and younger women (Holmes and Jermyn 2014). In such a landscape, it seems more necessary than ever that the matrix of gender, ageing and celebrity become a key focus for the energies of celebrity studies, and it is this arena that this collection of chapters aims precisely to address.

Going grey on the silver screen: older women and Hollywood

The authors here examine a broad range of historical, national and industrial contexts in order to interrogate the relationship between female celebrity and ageing – an approach which is particularly instructive in an era in which the spaces and ways in which celebrity and stardom are experienced and communicated have proliferated hugely – including television drama, reality TV, European cinema and internet community forums and gossip sites. But during the development of this collection it was remarkable to see just how overwhelmingly responses to the call for papers focussed on Hollywood stars (and indeed white Hollywood stars: questions of ethnicity remain particularly neglected within the field). Hollywood has long stood as a kind of exemplary instance of popular culture’s erasure of older women and it has become a truism to note that women ‘of a certain age’ in mainstream film see their roles run out long before their male counterparts do. Of course it would be wrong to suggest that all male actors are immune to the vicissitudes of ageing on screen; as David Lusted notes, ‘the careers of pretty-boy stars like Jeffrey Hunter or Pat Boone tend to disappear from view as the paunches develop’ (2012, p. 364). Nevertheless, while ageing women stars consistently fade away from the public eye, many male actors can expect to keep playing the romantic Hollywood hero – to a much younger woman protagonist, naturally – well into their fifties and beyond. As Simon Biggs has noted in the Journal of Ageing Studies, older women are doubly damned in terms of maintaining a presence in public life. He argues that they are perceived overwhelmingly in terms of loss and lack:

[One] can foster the identity of a being a young woman more easily than being an old woman, both of which are premised on an absence. However, old age encompasses a double absence, that of being ‘not male’ and of being ‘not young’. From being only toovisible, one becomes invisible, as the attention of a masculinised and youth-obsessed society ebbs away

(Biggs 2004, p. 49).

Hollywood, of course, is frequently accused of being precisely what Biggs describes, a ‘masculinised and youth-obsessed’ industry, preoccupied with chasing the opening weekend dollars seemingly spent predominantly by young men. Studio executives maintain that this young male audience has no interest in seeing female-led films or older women on screen, therefore films featuring either stand little chance of being made (Tally 2008, pp. 119–120). But of late it appears the wisdom of this position may be losing ground, with the spending power of older audiences having seemingly been underlined by a run of hugely successful films with older women stars, including Mamma Mia! (2008); Julie and Julia (2009); It’s Complicated (2009) (interestingly all of which speak to the import and appeal of Meryl Streep in this movement) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011). Nevertheless, to use the same instructive data as Holmlund (2010), recent findings from the US Screen Actors Guild statistically bear out the truth of Biggs’ analysis in terms of the skewed demographic content of screen media representations. In 2009, US Screen Actors Guild found that:

• Males continue to make up the majority of roles reported, especially in the supporting category, where they contribute around two roles for every female role. This two to one ratio has held steady from 2006 . . . Females hold a slightly larger proportion of lead roles, compared to their proportion of supporting roles, although still considerably less than lead roles occupied by males.
• For males 40 and over, roles appear to be on the rise in both theatrical and television productions. In theatrical productions, 40 and over male roles ticked up from 40% to 43% . . . while male 40 and over roles in television increased from 40% to 42%. Female 40 and over roles continue to be harder to come by as they represented only 28% of female roles in 2008 (Screen Actors Guild 2009).

From this, one can gather that not only do male actors take the majority of roles (both lead and supporting), but roles for 40+ men are apparently rising. On the flip side, it is women over 40 who have the slimmest chance of being cast, in any role at all, evidently to the chagrin of older women audiences; a 2011 survey by the UK Film Council found that 69% of the female respondents aged 50–75 felt that their group [tended] to be significantly under-represented’ (http://industry.bfi.org.uk/). Given this dearth of opportunities it is not surprising that once the big screen beckons less often, some women stars find that the chief way to maintain their public visibility (cf. Jane Fonda) is in service to cosmetic anti-ageing industries. One of the few reliable and lucrative avenues of employment that remains open to this minority of women stars and former A-list models once they reach ‘a certain age’, is to front advertising campaigns for mature cosmetics lines. While some stars are adopted by high-end brands to be the face of their anti-ageing products, such as Sharon Stone at Christian Dior (‘More beautiful today than at 20’) or Catherine Zeta Jones at Elizabeth Arden, a flick through Good Housekeeping (US) magazine in October 2011 illustrates just how widely the proliferation of such endorsements runs across a range of price points. In this edition alone the reader will find: Diane Keaton for L ’Oreal’s ‘Age Perfect’; Christy Turlington for Maybelline’s ‘Instant Age Rewind Eraser Dark Circles’; Ellen DeGeneres for Cover Girl’s ‘Simply Ageless’ foundation (‘I like prunes. But I don ’t want to look like one’); Diane Lane for Neutrogena’ s ‘Rapid Wrinkle Repair’; Juliana Margulies for L’Oreal’ s ‘Revitalift’; and Andie McDowell for L ’Oreal’s ‘Visible Lift’ foundation (‘Smooth is the new young’). Thus, these women stars come to be embedded in promulgating the very products and industry that perpetuates the ageist culture which so often delimits their careers as they age.

It is particularly intriguing to note in such a context that where Hollywood has produced a handful of much cited depictions of older women, these have often most memorably taken the form of portrayals of ageing female stars. Key among these historical, reflexive accounts of the damaging machinery of fame and its particularly punishing ramifications for older women are Sunset Boulevard (1950) (with Gloria Swanson as forgotten silent film actress Norma Desmond); All About Eve (1950) (with Bette Davis as ageing stage actress Margo Channing); and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) (Bette Davis again, as Baby Jane, former vaudeville child star and sister to ex-movie star Blanche (Joan Crawford)). In what Anne Morey has called the ‘elegaic female grotesque’ (2011, p. 107), such films star some of cinema history’s most celebrated Hollywood women actors during the demise of the classical period, playing out exaggerated and discomforting performances of female ageing. These are roles in which ageing itself is rendered as a horrifying process of inexorable decline, with female ageing, and the ageing of female stars particularly, figured as grotesque and traumatic. The refusal to properly relinquish the expectation of public attention which fame has afforded – but which our culture demands older women must surrender as their sexual allure fades and they enter into invisibility – is figured as both the source and evidence of mental instability. In dramatising this paradoxical state of affairs, the films thus consciously grapple with one of the key contradictions and problems posed by female fame.

At many levels, then, these are deeply conservative and delimiting representations of female ageing that embody the disgust ‘old women’ evoke in our culture. These ‘meta-filmic’ texts (ibid.) both speak to the lack of diverse roles open to women actors once they pass their Hollywood sell-by date, and dramatise the injustice of this industrial gendered disparity within their own narratives. Yet at the same time, these films might be said to enact a resistance to the very industry from which they emanate. Underlining the importance of performance to more fully conceptualising this field, for example, Jodi Brooks says of Norma Desmond and Baby Jane that, ‘Through their pacing of performance, these characters stretch the temporary economyof spectacle, charging the image with a kind of rage’ (1999, pp. 234–235). Adopting the same idiom, Morey describes these films as ‘an expression of rage against [the] system’ (2011, p. 107) and suggests it is reductive to understand them only as evidencing the desperation of the women stars who took on such roles. Rather, she suggests, ‘These parts permit female performers to dramatize the problems of female celebrity at the same time that they allow them to display their own talents as performers’ (ibid.). Such analyses underline the importance of revisiting and re-examining the popularly held belief that, almost by definition, Hollywood cinema and popular culture can afford no productive or creative space to older women stars. How, then, have some older women stars refused the fate of invisibility proffered to them as their careers began to wane? How have some disrupted conventional patterns of female ageing? To address these questions necessitates a process of revision and intervention that the authors in this collection undertake, even while they freque...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: 'Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming back': ageing, ageism and the lifespan of female celebrity
• 2. 'Women rule Hollywood': ageing and freelance stardom in the studio system
• 3. 'Get off your asses for these old broads!': Elizabeth Taylor, ageing and the television comeback movie
• 4. 'Glorious, glamorous and that old standby, amorous': the late blossoming of Diane Keaton's romantic comedy career
• 5. Channel hopping: Charlotte Rampling in French cinema of the early 2000s
• 6. Reality (celebrity) check: fat, death and the ageing female body
• 7. Pride and prejudice: celebrity versus fictional cougars
• 8. The uses and functions of ageing celebrity war reporters
• 9. Nothing less than perfect: female celebrity, ageing and hyper-scrutiny in the gossip industry
• 10. From old media whore to new media troll: the online negotiation of Madonna's ageing body
• Index