|
|
This is supposed to be a 65 year old.
In movies and television shows, an actress often tends to look younger than the age her character is supposed to be. When the character is middle-aged or older, this is a case of Hollywood Old. A character can be "supposed to be" a certain age in two ways: Either an age is stated outright in the story, or the character is a historical person.
Hollywood Old activates in three slightly different ways.
- The actress is far younger than the character is at any point in the story.
- The character starts out in an age bracket appropriate for the actress. However, as the years go by (or are skipped by time travel, whether in universe or in the meta sense) and the character ages, hardly anything is done to make the actress look older.
- The actress and the character are technically the same age, but the actress looks much younger because of Botox, plastic surgery et cetera. The character is a real woman who looked her age or a fictional character inhabiting a time, place, or economic situation in which such things aren't available.
When a Hollywood Old character has teenage or adult children, the age difference may become a Playing Gertrude.
Characters that are Older Than They Look should not be considered Hollywood Old, as long as the difference between looks and actual age is explained in one way or another. Improbable Age can be considered Hollywood Old when not justified in one way or another.
In itself, Hollywood Old isn't a gendered trope. However, like Hollywood Homely, Hollywood Old seems to be mostly restricted to actresses. Hollywood Old is the reverse of Dawson Casting, where a young character is played by an actor who both is and looks somewhat older than the character is supposed to be. See also Absurdly Youthful Mother. Compare Hollywood Thin and similar Hollywood Tropes. Compare White Dwarf Starlet to see what Hollywood reserves for actual old actresses. Contrast Age Lift, where a story is changed so that the character will fit a (usually male) actor's age.
Examples:
Film
- In Dan In Real Life 24 year old Emily Blunt plays Ruthie Draper who's supposed to be 40ish. (Her age is never specified but she went to Highschool with Mitch and Dan who's ages are also not stated but Dan has a 17 year old daughter and played by Steve Carrel so it's safe to say the characters are in at least their 40's)
- Justified as apparently Ruthie has had a lot of plastic surgery on her herself being a plastic surgeon.
- Agora: Even in the first scenes, the character Hypatia ought to already be much older than her actress. By the end of the movie, the character was 60 or 65, while the actress still looked like 25 to 35.
- Given various sources of her birthdate, Hypatia might be as young as 45. Rachel Weisz was 39. Also, the film took aesthetic license in liberal dosage, so Hypatia might even be canonically in her 30s in the movie.
- Sara Dane: At the beginning of the movie, Sara is 18. The actress looks the part. However, the movie spans most of Sara's life, without the actress ever showing any signs of aging. Halfway through the movie, she has drifted into Hollywood Old territory. and at the end she even has children who look older than she does.
- The Aviator: A classic type 2. Leonardo DiCaprio is right for only the first few scenes, then looks way too young during the rest of the movie. Makes it look as if everything accomplished by the middle-aged Howard Hughes was actually accomplished by a man still in his 20s.
- In Superman Returns, Lois Lane was the mother of a 5-year-old and was experienced and established enough in her career to have won a Pulitzer Prize. She was played by then-22-year-old Kate Bosworth.
- In Scrooge 1970, a then 34-year-old Albert Finney played elderly Scrooge. They do a pretty good job of making him look older, but Finney still looks significantly younger than Scrooges in other adaptations of A Christmas Carol. Finney also played the young adult Scrooge (late teens/20s).
- However, Scrooge may not be as old as most adaptations show him to be. He is usually played by actors in their late sixties (or made-up to look so), but if the woman Scrooge once courted had a teenager and an infant at the time when Jacob Marley died, which was seven years prior to the story's present, then Scrooge is probably somewhere around 50, maybe a few years older.
- Speaking of Belle, in the 1951 and 1984 films, both her past and present ages were played by the same actresses.
- Anyway, Albert Finney did an excellent job of playing the mid-50s Hercule Poirot, when he himself was in his mid-30s, in Murder on the Orient Express. It took the help of some make-up, but Finney is a very good actor.
- Likewise, in ACT's annual stage production, the laundress and charwoman, who are middle-aged, are often played by younger actresses. The late John Gilbert, the original Scrooge in the production, started playing the role at age 37.
- Having Angela Lansbury, famous for playing a Little Old Lady Investigates on Murder, She Wrote, play Agatha Christie's elderly spinster detective Miss Marple in the film version of The Mirror Crack'd might seem like a very logical move. However, said film was made back in 1980, when Lansbury by her own admission was 20 years too young for the role.
- In the Watchmen movie, Matthew Goode was about 27 or 28 when he was filmed as 45/46-year-old Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. Possibly justified, as Veidt's age in the film is never given, and he's meant to be preternaturally youthful-looking anyway.
- The main trio at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 are type 2. It's supposed to be 19 years later, and yet it looks like they just stayed up late last night.
- It wasn't that bad. Ron and Malfoy were very obviously balding and probably looked older than they were supposed to look as a result.
- The scene was originally filmed with the actors in hideous old age makeup that made them look closer to 70. Everyone agreed that the subtler approach was better.
- In The Sound Of Music, a then-35-year-old Christopher Plummer played Captain Von Trapp, who was actually in his 50s at the time the movie was set.
- Guy Pearce appears with a quite unconvincing makeup job to play the very aged Peter Weyland in Prometheus. Footage of Weyland as a young man had been shot, but was cut from the film and only appears on its website.
- In Queen Of The Damned, forty-year-old Paul McGann plays David Talbot, a character who's supposed to be quite old. At one point he says he's "too old to live forever" and it comes across a bit strangely, particularly if you know the line was written for someone who's actually old.
- In the film version of Mortal Instruments series, 36-year-old Luke Garroway is played by 29-year-old Aidan Turner.
Live-Action TV
- In one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard is reunited with a woman he dated 20 or so years ago. The woman looks like she's 25, as a result of 24th century medical science. Similarly, "The Survivors" features 67-year-old John Anderson playing 85-year-old Kevin Uxbridge and 55-year-old Anne Haney playing 82-year-old Rishon Uxbridge (that said, the Uxbridge's given ages might be false because Kevin is really a powerful energy being and Rishon is an illusion). The pilot has 67-year-old DeForest Kelley playing 137-year-old Admiral McCoy (although he does look pretty withered).
- In the episode "The Pegasus", Terry O'Quinn plays Commander Riker's former CO, Admiral (formerly Captain) Pressman. Pressman is, presumably, 15-20 years older than Riker, but Terry O'Quinn, who plays Pressman, is barely a month older than Jonathan Frakes.
- In the Doctor Who episode "The Girl in the Fireplace", (adult) Reinette looks exactly the same no matter what year she's shown in. Except when she's a child.
- In season seven, a big deal is made out of the Ponds moving on with their lives and aging every time the Doctor comes back to see them (they mention having traveled with The Doctor for 10 years). The problem with that second bit? Not one bit of effort is made to make Arthur Darvill and Karen Gillan look like anything other than extremely attractive people in their early thirties.
- Although considering Amy was maybe nineteen in her first episode and about twenty-one during season five, "early thirties" arguably is them aging and moving on with their lives.
- In season one of the old Doctor Who, the First Doctor has an Accidental Marriage to a woman we find in what's sort of an Aztec retirement village. The actress is younger than the one playing the Doctor's granddaughter. You'd think they could at least get a woman over thirty to play a woman over sixty.
- LOST: With all the flashbacks and flashforwards and time travel going on, the same character can be Hollywood Old and looking too young in the same episode. In later seasons this is sometimes averted by making the same character be played by different actresses (who look really similar but with a clear age difference) in different time periods. This series contain several cases of Playing Gertrude that are NOT also cases of Hollywood Old.
- Happens a lot in the present-day scenes in Cold Case, particularly in episodes where the case in question took place before about 1960.
- This
 is the 50-year-old King Henry VIII according to The Tudors. This◊ is the 50-year-old Henry VIII according to Hans Holbein the Younger.
- Charles Brandon is this trope in spades. You'd never guess that Henry Cavill is supposed to be portraying a sixty-year old man during the war scenes in France. He looks young and fit until he's inexplicably given wrinkles and graying hair in the final episode.
- In Jesus Of Nazareth, Olivia Hussey plays the Blessed Virgin Mary, who appears to remain the same age until after The Crucifixtion.
Video Games
- Old Lady Gibson in Fallout New Vegas, despite her white hair, barely looks older than about 40. Then again, some people in real life get gray hair at 30 or earlier. This also applies to the older age settings for the player character (said to go up to 60), as there is no "wrinkled" face option for them outside of mods, unlike certain NPC's.
|
|
