Older Women Are Having A Very Visible Moment

I’ve always been a huge champion of young women. Now I’m asking them to forge a new partnership

Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door; Renee Zellweger is back as Bridget, in the London Times newspaper.

Strong images of older women are everywhere. Merci Gisele echoed across the world last year as a 73-year-old woman took on all the men in the world. Everyone except the editors at Time magazine agreed that she was person of the year.

Popular culture imagery and our learned prejudices have distorted our viewing lens so grossly that many of us feel discomfort when we look at an older woman’s face or body in close up on screen or in an advertisement. These prejudices about beauty standards are so ingrained that even older women may feel some level of awkwardness when we look at our rapidly changing bodies. And this despite the fact that the 50s are about peak body confidence for most women. I hope millennials got the body-is-just-a-body memo a few decades earlier.

In real life, of course, we just invisibilize older women. We don’t react this way with older men in any roles, on or off screen. That’s why it was liberating to see Emma Thompson, 63, bare every wrinkle in 2022’s Good Luck To You, Leo Grande.

Thompson plays a retired school teacher who has faked orgasms for 31 years with her one sexual partner, now dead. She hires a younger sex worker to make her body feel less like the “carcass” she’s been “heaving around” for decades—for one “final attempt”. She’s a woman so of course her need to experience pleasure makes her feel guilty. Other toxic ladies-only emotions she feels? Shame and regret.

Talking of fake orgasms, Meg Ryan, now 63, just revisited her cult scene from When Harry Met Sally (she was 27 then) for an ad for Hellman’s Mayonnaise. Sally, who thinks Harry is a “human affront to all women” demonstrates that it’s not possible to tell real from fake, a truth in which all women have practical experience.

WATCH When Sally Met Hellmann's: Super Bowl Commercial 2025

Incidentally, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but all the new sexual health influencers on Instagram are no longer scared of the M-word. Menopause—that ultimate self-battering of a woman’s body—is finally being freely discussed. Maybe sexual health influencer Seema Anand, 62, should do an Indian version of last year’s Want, a collection of 174 anonymous sexual fantasies by women from around the world. It is edited by Gillian Anderson, 56.

The Times of London recently had 55-year-old Renee Zellweger splashed across the its front page. Ditto UK Vogue. Thank you to mainstream publications for giving Bridget Jones a worthy welcome.

Both Nicole Kidman, 57, in Babygirl and Demi Moore, 62, in Substance (she won best actress at the Golden Globes) should be cheered for their radical—non-mainstream at least—choices. When she collected the award, Moore shared a classic woman story. Thirty years ago a producer told her she was a popcorn artist—and for decades after she believed that even though she was super successful, she didn’t deserve any awards. She said she had spent a lifetime measuring herself and thanked the people who had believed in her “when I haven’t believed in myself”. The most brilliant, successful women have imposter syndrome.

Best actress nominees at the Golden Globes this year included Angelina Jolie (Maria), Kate Winslet (Lee), Nicole Kidman (Babygirl), Pamela Anderson (The Last Showgirl) and Tilda Swinton (The Room Next Door). Yes, even Pedro Almodovar made his English feature debut with two 64-year-old women, my favourites Julianne Moore and Swinton.

Moore and Swinton.

Jolie and Winslet are the babies on the above nomination list—they will both turn 50 this year. And to top it off, my favourite action heroes Cameron Diaz and Mila Jovovich have also made grand re-entries—I actually felt relief when I saw Diaz kicking butt and Back In Action.

I’m a huge advocate of younger women—I feel joy when they succeed and rage when they share stories that make me realise some things haven’t changed for them at all and that men as as violent as they were in my generation. But I’m also at a stage when I understand how hard it is for older women to stay relevant, and in the public eye.

And so here’s what I want to say to all women: We should cheer each other as loudly as we possibly can. Together we can survive anything.