Going Gray by Anne Kreamer

Author:Anne Kreamer [KREAMER, ANNE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO022000
ISBN: 9780316019675
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Is Gray Hair Illegal in Hollywood?

There is no professional milieu in which the currency of physical attractiveness is more important than in show business, where an appearance of youthfulness and one’s livelihood are explicitly, inextricably linked. Several serious actresses have become known for evidently eschewing plastic surgery as they age—-Meryl Streep (fifty-nine), Sigourney Weaver (fifty-eight), Susan Sarandon (sixty-one)—but apart from Jamie Lee Curtis (forty-nine), who is on a kind of one-woman campaign for middle-aged authenticity, there are no famous American actresses with naturally gray hair. None. Which is amazing.

The screenwriter Bruce Feirstein, who lives in LA (and has three James Bond movies to his credit), gave me his take. “Hollywood—movies, TV, mass entertainment—has always been focused on youth and vanity. And from the very beginning, actors—and particularly actresses—have always had a short shelf life. There’s always somebody new and younger and fresher coming up.

“When I was younger, I had a great moment of revelation about this with regard to an actress friend of mine. When we were in our late twenties and early thirties, she was a giant star. And then, in her midthirties, those sexy-leading-lady roles began to dry up. At the time, her friends fretted that this was due to her sometimes demanding personality. We would talk about what we had to do to ‘help her.’ But then one day I realized—it wasn’t her fault. It was just inevitable that someone would come along, ten years younger, and fit the same basic archetype.”

And, of course, the double standard concerning age for men and women in the movies is staggering. Gray-haired actors such as Richard Gere, George Clooney, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, and Paul Newman have all continued to get sexy-leading-man roles into their late forties, fifties, and sixties. For women meant to be convincingly sexy on-screen, fifty is pretty much the sell-by date. What has rather suddenly happened, for instance, to the careers of Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange and Meg Ryan? They all made the mistake of turning forty-five.

But none of them is heavy, or very saggy—or gray. “It isn’t so much a spoken pressure,” a movie-industry executive told me, “but one that’s as much a part of LA as sunshine: You can’t let yourself go.” And by “go,” he means “appear to age at normal speed.” I immediately thought of my old friend Jeff, the Ivy League–-educated TV writer in Santa Monica who’d told me bluntly that gray hair signaled to him that a woman had “given up.”

“You’re an actress, or an actor,” the executive said, “and you’re going to be forty feet tall on the screen. Talent is more or less a given, and somewhat unquantifiable—if there are six actresses who are more or less qualified for the role, it’s always going to go to the one that the director or studio thinks is most attractive. To ignore this is to be naive. Ditto to railing against it. Directors will often tell people to lose ten pounds or go to a trainer and tone that body.

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