一直以来，年龄对女性都有一种偏见。
貌似无论在哪个阶段，年龄对女性都很不友好。
30岁还没结婚，就是剩女；35岁怀孕是高龄产妇；
35岁再找工作被歧视；
40岁的女性，如果还在职场，要么是处于天花板，要么就是碌碌无为了。
年龄对普通女性如此，对那些女性演员更如此。
到了40岁再演少女被称“违和”，50岁只能演奶奶辈。
想起来一个趣闻，演员海清曾在一次颁奖典礼上说，
中年女演员无戏可拍，多给他们这些40+女演员一些机会吧。
但对比起来，貌似国外尤其是好莱坞的女演员中，50岁以上的女性还在担任主角，拍摄着一部又一部的精品。
40岁以上依然活跃在舞台，且依然担任女主的演员太多了，
温斯莱特，大魔王凯特.布兰切特，桑德拉.布洛克等等。
可是，我们的演员呢，还有很多人陷在家长里短的剧情中。
看看梅姨从年轻演到70多岁，每个年龄段都有精品出世。
难道，过了花季，女性演员就不能有合适的角色了吗？
这恰好也是《大西洋月刊》3月份中一篇文章探讨的问题。
Women of a Certain Age -当女性步入某个年龄段
Why stars in their 40s are at last getting interesting roles
为什么女性一过40岁就很难找到合适有趣的角色
文中对此进行了分析：
两位经济学家对1921年到2011年美国电影从业人员的性别数据进行调查，
发现：这90年来，2/3的男性占据了几乎所有电影的所有角色。
在20岁时，女性担任主角的比例是4/5。
而到了40岁，男女明星担任主角的比例似乎反转，比例为80：20。
也就是说：100个电影主角中，有80个是男演员担任的，只有20个是女演员担任。
所以，age is everything-年龄就是一切。
其中最关键的原因在于：社会对女性的刻板印象-贤妻良母。
40岁早已结婚生子，所以更适合那类“家庭伦理”的角色。
然而，文中也提到，近些年来，40岁以上的女星正不断接拍高水准的影视节目。
因为随着流媒体时代的来临，剧本越来越多，好故事也越来越多。
发展出了更多的角色，如女律师，女间谍，女强人等等，
而这就给了40岁以上女性更多的参与机会。
时代在进步，传统理念在逐渐进化。
女性同男性一样拥有商业的头脑和聪明才智。
本文可作为泛读材料。
In2019, a 60-year-old Emma Thompson explained her sudden career renaissance. She had spent her youth playing romantic leads, but once she turned 40, she said,she could fill such roles only “in a pinch.” The offers became more limited,the parts smaller: a batty clairvoyant in the Harry Potter series; a wronged wife in Love Actually; the voice inside Will Ferrell’s head in Stranger Than Fiction. Then another decade passed, and the opportunities became interesting again. Hallelujah! In the past five years alone, Thompson has played a High Court judge in The Children Act, an uptight television host in Late Night, and the British prime minister (twice).
Thompson had experienced what we might call “the dry decade.” The midlife plight of women in Holly wood was immortalized in an Amy Schumer sketch that achieved instant cult status when it aired six years ago. Three actresses are enjoying a picnic in a wooded glade, celebrating one of their number’s “Last Fuckable Day.” The women around the table— Patricia Arquette, Tina Fey, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus— are all attractive, smart, and funny. But that doesn’t matter. They’re over the hill in Hollywood’s eyes. Fey notes that eventually, women realize that the poster for their movie is “just, like, a picture of a kitchen.” Louis-Dreyfus adds that such films have “these very uplifting and yetvague titles, like Whatever It Takes or She Means Well.”
In2012, two economists from Clemson University analyzed the gender balance ofAmerican films from 1920 to 2011 and offered a more wonkish take on the phenomenon.Overall, they found that men accounted for two-thirds of all roles inmainstream movies. For starring roles, however, age is everything. At 20, women play four-fifths of leads: Hollywood is very interested in them at their nubile prime. Fast-forward to 40, and that statistic is reversed. Men utterly dominatethe juiciest parts. The male-female gender split then hovers around 80–20 until, well, death.
For the few women actors who come out the other side of the dry decade, the rewards canbe mixed. No longer able to portray ingenues, brides-to-be, or manic pixie dream girls, or be the Avengers’ diversity hire (sorry, Black Widow), olderactresses graduate into the other popular category open to women: hags andharpies. Meryl Streep once described the parts she was offered after 50 as women who were “gorgons or dragons or in some way grotesque.” Sure enough,Thompson’s late-career roles also include the Baroness in Cruella, Goneril in a TV-movie version of King Lear, and Miss Trunchbull in the upcoming music aladaptation of Matilda. Monsters, one and all.
But biology, it turns out, needn’t be destiny. A new generation of actresses has discovered an answer to the dry decade, and is showing the rest of us what we’ve been missing—stories that capture the fullness of women’s lives.
To understand the problem (and because the experience is always pleasant), consider Tom Hanks. He might be “America’s Dad,” but his career represents atype of ageless versatility long afforded by the film industry—to male actors. In his 30s, Hanks wooed Elizabeth Perkins in Big, Meg Ryan in Sleepless inSeattle, and Robin Wright in Forrest Gump. (I am excluding Beasley, the dog from Turner & Hooch, from this analysis, though IMDb sadly records that Beasley never worked again.) Hanks’s next decade was anything but dry. In his 40s, he played an FBI agent in Catch Me If You Can, a Mob enforcer in Road to Perdition, Woody in Toy Story, and a man stranded on a deserted island in Cast Away, among other roles.
But what about his female co-stars? Their 40s were not exactly dazzling. At 41, Meg Ryan jettisoned her sweet, goofy image in In the Cut, playing an English teacher drawn into a sexual relationship with a potential serial killer. The critical reception dwelled on the film’s erotic atmosphere, and Ryan’s on screen nudity was greeted as an unwelcome surprise. She has since said that the film marked a “turning point” from which her career never recovered.
Neither Elizabeth Perkins nor Robin Wright fared well in the film industry, either. Butthey did have success elsewhere—and this is where the story of the dry decade takes an intriguing turn. Perkins spent her mid-to-late 40s on Showtime’s Weeds, as the lead character’s narcissist neighbor, Celia—and earned three Emmy nominations for the role. At 46, Wright started playing Claire Underwood in House of Cards, and by the final season had graduated from first lady to president.
Perkins and Wright were among the first wave of women to benefit from the golden age of television. Since then, the streaming wars have created a huge demand for new dramas, and the increased opportunities are obvious. In her 40s, Reese Witherspoon has starred in Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Morning Show. (As a bonus, the last of these also rescued Jennifer Aniston froma film industry that never quite seemed to know what to do with her.) The HBO remake of Scenes From a Marriage gave 44-year-old Jessica Chastain a role every bit as challenging as an Ibsen heroine. At 46, Sandra Oh began playing a weary spy locked in a deadly pas de deux with a glamorous assassin in Hulu’s Killing Eve. And at the same age, Kate Winslet undertook one of the standout roles of her career, as Mare Sheehan, the stoic detective in HBO’s Mare of Easttown.
Compared with the dead ends that Ryan, Per[1]kins,and Wright encountered in traditional Holly[1]wood,the trajectory for female stars is thriving on the competition among HBO, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and others. A glut of roles now combine the personal and the professional, offering a chance not to be pigeon holed as “the wife” or“the mom”—or, conversely, the career woman free of domestic responsibilities.Think about the dry decade: It has amounted to a desert of roles between love interest and empty nester, as Holly wood has struggled to incorporate the challenges of motherhood into narratives about women engaged elsewhere too.
The 2010 film Salt, about a CIA spy accused of being a Russian sleeper agent, is a notorious example of the basic motherhood problem. Originally intended for Tom Cruise, the script was rewritten for its eventual star, Angelina Jolie. That entailed one big change: Edwin Salt was a parent; Evelyn Salt was not. “If a woman had a child, I think it would be very hard for us not to imagine her kind of holding on to that child through the entire film,” Jolie said at the time.“Which is strange—but I think audiences would allow a man to have a child and the child [could] be with the wife back at home.” (When making Salt, Jolie herself was a working mother of six children, including 2-year-old twins.)
Television series are hungry for plotlines, and their cast lists spread like tree roots asseasons progress, giving women new room to grow. In stark contrast to the narrowness of Jolie’s role in Salt, Keri Russell transitioned from her late 30s into her 40s as Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans, navigating the identities of mother, travel agent, and Soviet spy. In The Queen’s Gambit, deft touches filled out the portrait of Beth Harmon’s alcoholic adoptive mother, Alma, played by Marielle Heller, who had recently turned 40.
In accommodating characters who are mothers, without that being their only identity, television has brought new tensions and texture to established genres. Where male detectives have tended—to the point of cliché—to be troubled, maverick loners, Olivia Colman’s Ellie Miller found her investigations complicated by her own family turmoil and deep links to the local town in the British crime show Broadchurch. Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan is similarly embedded in her community, at the center of a loving, chaotic, and grieving clan in the kind of suburb where everyone has secrets and everyone is trying to cope: with addiction, with loss, with something as mundane as America’s lack of afford[1]able child care.
The wide-angle lens of television invites immersion in a pivotal midlife decadethat—for anyone juggling a career, children, and aging parents, as well as their own compromises, regrets, and unfulfilled ambitions—is anything but dry. “I always imagined I’d be a cop,” Mare tells a younger police officer. “It’s the life around me I didn’t expect to fall apart so spectacularly.”
Helen Lewis is a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights
联系客服
