It looks like finally getting the spotlight at 60. It looks like Kerry Washington producing vehicles for Viola Davis. It looks like a script where the 70-year-old woman gets the final chase scene, not the knitting circle.
The watershed moment for this shift is often credited to the 2015 Vanity Fair profile of Viola Davis, where she declared, "The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity." But she was also speaking about age. Davis, along with peers like Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, and Sandra Oh, began demanding narratives where age was not the plot, but merely a texture.
These women are not "aging well." They are simply living well. They have rejected the filler and the facelift culture, not because they are vain, but because they want to use their faces to act. What does the next decade look like for mature women in entertainment?
Isabelle Huppert’s performance in Elle (2016) at age 63 was a masterclass in complexity—a brutal, funny, terrifying portrayal of a rape survivor. No American studio would have financed that film, but it earned an Oscar nomination. The lesson? The American appetite exists; the American courage has just been slow to develop. We cannot write a complete article without acknowledging the remaining battle. The double standard is still viciously alive. When Hugh Grant gets craggy, he is "distinguished." When Meg Ryan shows signs of aging, she is "unrecognizable."
Think of Andie MacDowell embracing her natural grey curls on the red carpet. Think of Jamie Lee Curtis (64) doing push-ups in her Oscar dress. Think of Helen Mirren, who at 78, is still the sexiest person in any room she enters.