In the new, intriguing and highly watchable French film, A Private Life, Jodie Foster plays a smart mess of a psychiatrist who gets caught up in uncovering the reasons behind the recent death of a patient.
I’ve grown up watching Jodie Foster in the movies, mostly because she started as a child and gained worldwide fame and her first Academy Award nomination for playing a street hooker in Taxi Driver.
She was 12 years old when she made that film and by the time she turned forty she had already won two best actress Oscars – one for The Accused (1989) and the other for Silence of the Lambs (1992).
Being a movie star for that long etches your image in people’s brains, especially for a fan like myself. But nothing prepared me for the moment in A Private Life when they introduce a character who I initially thought was her grandfather but realized couldn’t be because they quickly begin flirting with each other and are soon…
Well, never mind.
As it turns out, it’s her ex-husband and he’s played by the French actor-director Daniel Auteuil. Even in a French film, this seemed like an odd leap of faith to me until I couldn’t stand it any longer and paused the movie to look up their ages.
As it turns out Jodie Foster is 63 years-old and Mr. Auteuil is a mere 12 years older. A perfect age range for the characters but quite a wake-up call for moi.
I mean, how old did I think she was?
Of course, I never gave it any thought because even though she doesn’t appear to have had any cosmetic “enhancements” (Note: Or perhaps because of that) she merely looked like Jodie Foster.
Also, she’s younger than I am, so how old could I even imagine she looked?
I’m not sure but in my mind nowhere NEAR the age where this guy could believably be her HUSBAND unless the MASSIVE age difference was a story point.
Which it wasn’t.
The real story here is my reaction and I suspect the reaction of many of us to how we see ourselves, our peers and the cultural “icons” we grew up with.
But even more importantly, what we imagine getting “older,” or worse yet, looking older, really means.
Fran Lebowitz was recently a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, an oxymoron if I ever heard one. In any event, she told a funny story about getting older as a famous person and noted there were really only three categories of age:
Young, old and surgical.
Thanks to social media, one no longer has to live in Los Angeles to feel that way. All over the country, and likely the world, we refuse to accept not only our age but the age of our icons.
Unless, that is, the icons openly look old or even older. Or want to continue to play in younger spaces.
Which these days is pretty much anywhere since everyone has a camera and can post your latest pic everywhere.
Now there is nothing wrong with growing older and, as many an older person told me before I breezed past Jodie’s age, it beats the alternative.
There’s that phrase, as well as, getting old is a privilege.
Which you realize, once you get older, that it indeed is since most of us don’t want to die any time soon – hence, the privilege.
There are recent examples of icon-ish show biz figures making a point of their, um, lack of youth, and using it to their benefit.
Taking the stage at the Astra Awards last week to pick up the creative organization’s Timeless award, the openly 67-year-old actress Sharon Stone recounted how, earlier in the evening, a group of young people who didn’t know who she was rudely accused her of stealing a chair to sit at their table.
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After proclaiming, award in hand, now they do, and telling them F you from the stage, she went on to give a memorable speech about artistic determination and preparation, as well as putting any fame you have to use for social activism towards issues you care about.
Sixty-year-old Robert Downey, Jr. cited he was double the age of Timothee Chalamet at a recent event he himself instigated in order to promote the latter’s soon-to-be Oscar nominated performance in Marty Supreme.
Calling the younger actor’s work in the film a generation defining performance in a decade-defining film, the now gray-haired Downey embraced the age difference in front of a room full of potential Hollywood Oscar voters and recalled how much it meant to him when then old-timers like Warren Beatty and Anthony Hopkins reached out to him publicly when he was 27-years-old and blew them away with his performance as the silent screen legend in Chaplin.
Downey had no trouble embracing his now elder status but no doubt there are a group of longtime fans who shudder at the thought that the quintessential troubled party boy from Less Than Zero or the cool bro they marveled at, Tony Stark, aka the original Ironman, will soon be able to collect social security.
It is interesting to note that none of the above people mentioned quite look their age (Note: Though what DOES any ACTUAL age look like anymore?) to us, whether by design or our refusal to accept the number of chronological years they’ve been around.
This also begs the bigger question of whether celebrities, or regular people like us, get marginalized for the actual NUMBER or for not looking an indeterminate fifty-ish for the entirety of their golden years right up until DEATH.
Rachel Ward had a long career in the 1980s, 90s and beyond as a Golden Globe-winning movie and TV star, as well as model, with a worldwide following that Gen X, Y and Z are likely unfamiliar with. But what they might now know her for this week is being the derisive object of online trolls for daring to appear as her gray-haired, dark-eyebrowed bespeckled 68-year-old real-self on social media in order to promote her Australian farm and its sustainability initiative.
I mean, how dare she?
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Now, was I shocked when my husband showed me the picture above?
Um, yes. And then I was both appalled and surprised.
At myself.
Because on closer inspection I thought she kind of looked hippy dippy good!
Maybe I’m finally beginning to evolve for the better.
Which is more than I can say for the rest of the country and the world at this point in time.
About so many things.
Lana Del Rey – “Young and Beautiful”
notes from a chair 