Celebrity Studies

ISSN: 1939-2397 (Print) 1939-2400 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel20

‘Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming back’:

ageing, ageism and the lifespan of female celebrity

Deborah Jermyn

To cite this article: Deborah Jermyn (2012) ‘Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming
back’: ageing, ageism and the lifespan of female celebrity, Celebrity Studies, 3:1, 1-12, DOI:
10.1080/19392397.2012.644708

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2012.644708

Published online: 17 Feb 2012.

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 Celebrity Studies
Vol. 3, No. 1, March 2012, 1–12

Introduction – ‘Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming back’:
ageing, ageism and the lifespan of female celebrity
Deborah Jermyn*

Department of Media, Culture and Language, Roehampton University, London, UK

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I want to open this special edition with a question. When does a woman become an ‘old
woman’? Or if that is too sweeping, too crude, when does a woman become an ‘older
woman’? In fact, the latter question is not any easier to answer. Because of course, we are
all, by the simple virtue of living and breathing, becoming ‘older’ all the time. By the time
you reach the end of this essay, you’ll be older than you are now, in chronological terms at
least.
We live today in an ageing population where the boundaries of what counts as old
appear to be shifting all the time – 40 is the new 30, we’re regularly told, 50 is the new
40 and so on. A recent television advert for ‘Age Re-Perfect Foundation’ by L’Oreal illus-
trates this nebulous landscape well, as a vibrant Jane Fonda is seen carefully choosing an
outfit and delighting in applying her make-up, before peeking though her window where
she gimpses a man outside, evidently waiting for her during what we now understand to be
her preparation for a date (www.youtube.com 2011). Such ‘girling’ of older women is both
symptomatic of postfeminist culture and indicative of a move to push back the boundaries
of ageing; now in her seventies, this ageing woman star is figured as being just as excited –
and just as entitled – to be going out on a date as a woman or girl a fraction of her age
might be.
I open with these thoughts in order to underline the inescapably subjective nature
of what this special edition is concerned with, namely the intersection of ageing and
female celebrity. As Susan Sontag notes in ‘The Double Standard of Aging’: ‘[A] woman
of “‘a certain age”, as the French say discreetly . . . might be anywhere from her early
twenties to her late fifties’ (1972). Since Sontag was writing, the blurring of ageing param-
eters has become even more manifest (across genders) as the commercial potential of
older consumers has become more significant. This shift has gained momentum as aver-
age life expectancies in numerous nations have increased, along with what is known as
‘active lifespan’; the ‘babyboom’ generation, figured as reluctant to give up their quality
of life, are entering retirement; and more recently at a global level, the economic down-
turn has meant people are expected to draw salaries for longer as retirement ages are
raised.1
Today, ventures such as the Saga group in the United Kingdom speak to an older
(financially secure) audience in ways which assume them to be active, vital, still passionate
about life and new experiences, just like L’Oreal’s Jane Fonda (note of course how her

*Email: d.jermyn@roehampton.ac.uk

ISSN 1939-2397 print/ISSN 1939-2400 online

© 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2012.644708
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 2 D. Jermyn

‘successful’ ageing is explicitly tied to her consumerism and use of the right products
‘exclusively designed for mature skin’). Within this apparently changing culture, film
stars like Helen Mirren and Julianne Moore seem to continue to reach new heights, to
become more celebrated, more accomplished, the older they get. Looking at their career
trajectories, age really is ‘just a number’ it seems, while Hollywood appears finally to be
learning to embrace its older women stars. Interviewed in Vogue’s annual ‘Ageless Style’
issue in 2009, Moore commented, ‘Whenever you ask anybody, Would you want to be
20 again, invariably they go, “No” . . . It’s great to be 48’ (Wood 2009, p. 163). But
while such sentiments have become commonplace, they are also something of a smoke-
screen, in part because they project ageing only in terms of a kind of extended middle
age, evading thinking about what Julia Twigg has called ‘the more challenging territory
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of deep old age’ (2004, p. 71). Putting the Saga marketing, and the Mirrens and the
Moores aside for a moment, we live in a culture where youth is still revered, envied, fought
over and – again, as Sontag described – ageing, and particularly ageing women, widely
feared.
In the inaugural edition of this journal published in 2010, Chris Holmlund opened
her essay on the then 55-year-old action cinema star, Jackie Chan, with the declara-
tion that, ‘Assessing ageing is one of the key tasks confronting celebrity studies today’
(p. 96). For Holmlund, reflection on the place of the ageing process within the machin-
ery of stardom has evidently been a significant absence in scholarship on celebrity. But
beyond this quite specific arena, it is apparent that the same kind of negligence can
be found right across film, media and television studies. The lack of such work does
a particular disservice to women in a culture where the ‘value’ ascribed to them is so
intrinsically tied up with youth, or accomplishing the illusion of it. In fact, we might
say there is something of a parallel to be found, between the elision or invisibility of
older women across many aspects of the media and public life, and their neglect within
precisely the critical fields which should be addressing this absence. While ageing stud-
ies and gerontology are now established areas of the academy within the social sciences,
when one looks at the existing broad terrain of screen and cultural studies, aside from the
work of a few notable scholars such as Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth
Gullette, the general disregard shown to age as a significant constituent of identity is
striking.2
This is especially so given that feminist work has long since cautioned against con-
ceptions of ‘woman’ as homogenous (e.g. at the level of ethnicity, class or sexuality).
Indeed, writing in 1999, Woodward argued that ‘ageism is entrenched within feminism
itself’ (p. xi), noting that the preoccupations of second wave feminism tended towards
‘issues that are associated with the earlier years in the life course’ (ibid). This state of
affairs has clearly not shifted with the advent of third-wave feminism, the discourses of
which centre largely on the lifestyles and ‘choices’ of younger women. Rather, a ‘genera-
tionalism’ has emerged in which older women, and the second-wave feminism they stand
for, tend to feature primarily as outdated antagonists to this younger generation. In tan-
dem with the popularisation of such postfeminist discourses, celebrity culture has grown
exponentially, often via platforms and formats which seem to privilege youth, as well as
the notion of competition between older and younger women (Holmes and Jermyn 2012).
In such a landscape, it seems more necessary than ever that the matrix of gender, ageing
and celebrity become a key focus for the energies of celebrity studies, and it is this arena
that this collection of essays aims precisely to address.
 Celebrity Studies 3

Going grey on the silver screen: older women and Hollywood

The authors here examine a broad range of historical, national and industrial contexts
in order to interrogate the relationship between female celebrity and ageing, including
television drama, reality TV, European cinema and internet gossip sites. But during the
development of this special edition it was remarkable to see just how overwhelmingly
responses to the call for papers focussed on Hollywood stars (and indeed white Hollywood
stars). Hollywood has long stood as a kind of exemplary instance of popular culture’s era-
sure of older women and it has become a truism to note that women ‘of a certain age’ in
mainstream film see their roles run out long before their male counterparts do. While these
women fade away from the public eye, male actors can expect to keep playing the romantic
Hollywood hero – to a much younger woman protagonist, naturally – well into their fifties
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and beyond. As Simon Biggs has noted in The Journal of Ageing Studies, older women
are doubly damned in terms of maintaining a presence in public life. He argues they are
perceived overwhelmingly in terms of loss and lack:

[One] can foster the identity of a being a young woman more easily than being an old woman,
both of which are premised on an absence. However, old age encompasses a double absence,
that of being ‘not male’ and of being ‘not young’. From being only too visible, one becomes
invisible, as the attention of a masculinised and youth-obsessed society ebbs away. (Biggs
2004)

Hollywood, of course, is frequently accused of being precisely what Biggs describes, a

‘masculinised and youth-obsessed’ industry, preoccupied with chasing the opening week-
end dollars seemingly spent predominantly by young men. Studio executives maintain
that this young male audience has no interest in seeing female-led films or older women
on screen, therefore films featuring either stand little chance of being made (Tally 2008,
pp. 119–120). Of late it appears the wisdom of this position may be losing ground, with the
spending power of older audiences having been underlined by a run of hugely successful
films with older women stars, including Mama Mia! (2008); Julie and Julia (2009) and It’s
Complicated (2009). Nevertheless, to use the same instructive data as Holmlund (2010),
recent findings from the US Screen Actors Guild statistically bear out the truth of Biggs’
analysis in terms of the skewed demographic content of screen media representations.
In 2009, US Screen Actors Guild found that:

• Males continue to make up the majority of roles reported, especially in the support-
ing category, where they contribute around two roles for every female role. This two
to one ratio has held steady from 2006 . . . Females hold a slightly larger propor-
tion of lead roles, compared to their proportion of supporting roles, although still
considerably less than lead roles occupied by males.
• For males 40 and over, roles appear to be on the rise in both theatrical and television
productions. In theatrical productions, 40 and over male roles ticked up from 40%
to 43% . . . while male 40 and over roles in television increased from 40% to 42%.
Female 40 and over roles continue to be harder to come by as they represented only
28% of female roles in 2008 (Screen Actors Guild 2009).

From this, one can gather that not only do male actors take the majority of roles (both lead
and supporting), roles for 40+ men are apparently rising. On the flip side, it is women
 4 D. Jermyn

over 40 who have the slimmest chance of being cast, in any role at all, evidently to the
chagrin of older women audiences; a 2011 survey by the UK Film Council found that 69%
of the female respondents aged 50–75 felt that their group ‘[tended] to be significantly
under-represented’ (www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk 2011). Given this dearth of opportunities
it is not surprising that once the big screen beckons less often, some women stars find
that the chief way to maintain their public visibility (cf. Jane Fonda) is in service to the
anti-ageing industries. One of the few reliable and lucrative avenues of employment that
remains open to this minority of women stars and former A-list models once they reach
‘a certain age’, is to front advertising campaigns for mature cosmetics lines. While some
stars are adopted by high-end brands to be the face of their anti-ageing products, such
as Sharon Stone at Christian Dior (‘More beautiful today than at 20’) or Catherine Zeta
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Jones at Elizabeth Arden, a flick through Good Housekeeping (US) magazine in October
2011 illustrates how the proliferation of such endorsements runs across a range of price
points. In just this edition alone the reader will find: Diane Keaton for L’Oreal’s ‘Age
Perfect’; Christy Turlington for Maybelline’s ‘Instant Age Rewind Eraser Dark Circles’;
Ellen DeGeneres for Cover Girl’s ‘Simply Ageless’ foundation (‘I like prunes. But I don’t
want to look like one’); Diane Lane for Neutrogena’s ‘Rapid Wrinkle Repair’; Juliana
Margulies for L’Oreal’s ‘Revitalift’; and Andie McDowell for L’Oreal’s ‘Visible Lift’
foundation (‘Smooth is the new young’). Thus, these women stars come to be embedded
in promulgating the very products and industry that perpetuates the ageist culture which so
often delimits their careers as they age.
It is particularly intriguing to note in such a context that where Hollywood has produced
a handful of much cited depictions of older women, these have most memorably taken the
form of portrayals of ageing female stars. Key among these historical, reflexive accounts
of the damaging machinery of fame and its particularly punishing ramifications for older
women are Sunset Boulevard (1950) (with Gloria Swanson as forgotten silent film actress
Norma Desmond); All About Eve (1950) (with Bette Davis as ageing stage actress Margo
Channing); Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) (Bette Davis again, as Baby Jane,
former vaudeville child star and sister to ex-movie star Blanche (Joan Crawford)). In what
Anne Morey has called the ‘elegaic female grotesque’ (2011, p. 107), such films star some
of cinema history’s most celebrated Hollywood women actors during the demise of the
classical period, playing out exaggerated and discomforting performances of female age-
ing. These are roles in which ageing itself is rendered as a horrifying process of inexorable
decline, with female ageing and the ageing of female stars particularly, figured as grotesque
and traumatic. The refusal to properly relinquish the expectation of public attention which
fame has afforded – but which our culture demands older women must surrender as their
sexual allure fades and they enter into invisibility – is figured as both the source and evi-
dence of mental instability. In dramatising this paradoxical state of affairs, the films thus
consciously grapple with one of the key contradictions and problems posed by female fame.
At many levels, then, these are deeply conservative and delimiting representations
of female ageing that embody the disgust ‘old women’ evoke in our culture. These
‘metafilmic’ texts (ibid) both speak to the lack of diverse roles open to women actors once
they pass their Hollywood sell-by date, and dramatise the injustice of this industrial gen-
dered disparity within their own narratives. Yet at the same time, these films might be said
to enact a resistance to the very industry from which they emanate. Underlining the impor-
tance of performance to more fully conceptualising this field, for example, Jodi Brooks
says of Norma Desmond and Baby Jane that, ‘Through their pacing of performance, these
characters stretch the temporary economy of spectacle, charging the image with a kind
of rage’ (1999, pp. 234–235). Adopting the same idiom, Morey describes these films as
 Celebrity Studies 5

‘an expression of rage against [the] system’ (2011 p. 107) and suggests it is reductive to
understand them only as evidencing the desperation of the women stars who took on such
roles. Rather, she suggests, ‘These parts permit female performers to dramatize the prob-
lems of female celebrity at the same time that they allow them to display their own talents as
performers’ (ibid). Such analyses underline the importance of revisiting and re-examining
the popularly held belief that, almost by definition, Hollywood cinema and popular cul-
ture can afford no productive or creative space to older women stars. How, then, have some
older women stars refused the fate of invisibility proffered to them as their careers began to
wane? How have some disrupted conventional patterns of female ageing? To address these
questions necessitates a process of revision and intervention that the authors in this col-
lection undertake, even while they frequently point simultaneously to the enduring manner
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in which media industries have undermined and devalued the women stars and celebrities
they once nurtured as they age.

Beyond the big screen: ‘Wrinklies with attitude’ and recent British TV
Much of what has been raised here so far speaks to the issue of older women’s neglect or
erasure, in terms of both popular culture itself and the extant scholarship in the field. But
this does not capture the whole picture. Moving away from the dominance of Hollywood
in these debates, elsewhere or in the context of British factual television at least, attention
to the experiences and discrimination enacted against older women in the public eye has
arguably never been more keenly debated or scrutinised. In recent years, the UK news
agenda has taken an unprecedented interest in the experiences of older women working
(or rather being prevented from working) in television, following a number of high-profile
sackings alleged to have been prompted by the twin prejudices of ageism and sexism. This
period thus provides some rich material with which to reflect on how the issue of ageing
and female celebrity has entered of late ‘into the spotlight’.
In 2007, the BBC’s decision to drop 55-year-old newsreader Moira Stuart from her
regular Sunday morning bulletin rendered its executives highly unpopular with her fans,
while in 2008 57-year-old presenter Selina Scott won a case against Channel 5 for reneg-
ing on a deal with her to cover newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky’s maternity leave. But it
was summer 2009 which saw Britain consumed by one of the most hotly debated news
stories to grip the public imagination in recent memory; when Arlene Philips, a 66-year-
old former dancer and experienced choreographer, was unceremoniously dropped by the
BBC as a judge on the hit Saturday evening prime-time dance show competition, Strictly
Come Dancing (2004–). The BBC eventually confirmed that Philips was to be replaced
by Alesha Dixon, the 30-year-old former singer with girl group Mis-Teeq, and a previous
series contestant who had won the competition in 2007. Phillips’ years of experience, then,
were to be traded for a virtual novice in the world of professional or competitive dancing,
while the show’s other – male – regulars, including 65-year-old judge Len Goodman and
81-year-old presenter Bruce Forsyth, remained unchanged. In the weeks that followed, the
dismissal of Phillips became the subject of massive national debate, prompting a display
of huge public support for the star and even reaching the level of government comment by
Equalities Minister, Harriet Harman.
Philips herself remained remarkably diplomatic through all this, perhaps not wanting to
burn any bridges at the BBC or with the industry more widely. But more recently, in 2011,
Miriam O’Reilly took on the might of the broadcaster when she successfully sued the BBC
for age discrimination after she was dropped from presenting Countryfile (1988–). While
sex discrimination was not proven, the details of her case nevertheless seemed undeniably
 6 D. Jermyn

gendered; she had been told to ‘be careful about those wrinkles’ and to consider Botox
and hair dye before she was sacked (Pilditch 2010), advice which says much again about
the huge investments older women are pressured to make in the multi-million pound anti-
ageing industries. The Philips and O’Reilly cases in particular brought the question of how
the BBC and television generally treats its older women ‘talent’ to the top of the media
agenda, giving rise to a reaction the public service broadcaster could not have anticipated,
during an unprecedented episode of critical and public dialogue about the issue. Some
responses were predictably reactionary. Following Selina Scott’s decision to sue Channel 5,
for example The Evening Standard wheeled out the ever-reliable Michael Winner to chip
in with a provocatively conservative outlook, as he commented that:
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Do these poor old dears not realise that TV producers employ women whom they believe the
public wish to see? . . . [Selina Scott]: viewers don’t want you on the sofa anymore. They
don’t want the other old wrinklies with attitude . . . The old ladies nurturing desperate hopes
of a comeback should realise there’s no place on the mat for them . . . Get a life, ladies. Your
old one is not coming back. (Winner 2008)

The irony here (which could perhaps be lost on readers outside of the United Kingdom) is
that this damning picture of older women comes from an ageing male film director, who
has carved out a place or reinvented himself on television following his own professional
heyday to become a fine dining ‘connoisseur’ and car insurance salesman. But equally,
the sackings of these women prompted other rather more positive responses and outcomes,
helping effect what looks to be a new era of attentiveness to such discrimination. The readi-
ness with which much of the public wanted to debate the Strictly affair, and the degree
of apparent resistance to the under-representation of older women on television, point to
just how acutely contentious the issue has become at this time. Public support for Arlene
Philips underlined how the BBC had been wrong to presume many audiences objected
to older women on their screens; a position that was bolstered further in 2009 when Age
Concern and Help The Aged commissioned an ICM poll which found that 71% of respon-
dents ‘said they would be happy to see older women like Arlene Philips on television’ (Age
Concern 2009). Furthermore, following the O’Reilly case the BBC announced that there
were to be ‘new rules for “fair selection for presenter appointments” as well as increased
training’ (Foster 2011). Putting all this into practice in order to implement tangible change
is quite another matter of course. But given the apparent audience trends and opinions that
have been pointed to here, as well as the cultural and demographic shifts already described
that are underway, could it be that the time has never been more ripe for a newly imagined,
newly representative lifespan for female celebrity?

Back in the spotlight: essays in this edition

To begin our exploration of this field, this special edition opens with an historical enquiry
into how the Hollywood studios’ notorious contract system and gradual move to freelanc-
ing impacted on the careers and salaries of both male and female stars. Emily Carman’s
intriguing account charts how some female actors in classical and early post-classical
Hollywood were able to break from the constraints of restrictive contracts to become suc-
cessful freelance stars who negotiated shrewd independent deals as they aged. Drawing
on a range of industry archive collections, Carman’s work challenges the widely held
notion that as they grew older, women stars no longer contracted to a studio were effec-
tively ‘washed up’. Rather, as ‘free agents’ in the 1930s and 1940s particularly, stars such
 Celebrity Studies 7

as Irene Dunne and Barbara Stanwyck ‘worked more autonomously and prolonged their
careers beyond what is generally imagined of female actors’, sometimes achieving not just
lucrative salaries and percentage deals that outdid the terms enjoyed by their male co-stars,
but ‘riders’ that gave them their choice of director, script approval and so on. Ultimately
these deals generally proved to be finite for women stars rather sooner than they did for
men, and Carman notes how the salaries and power balance of this period shifted in the
1950s to overwhelmingly favour male stars. Nevertheless, through pioneering the ‘risk-
taking’ course of freelancing, Carman shows how these Classical Hollywood woman stars
‘broke new ground to help establish practices that have become commonplace for A-list
stars negotiating deals in the industry today’.
If opportunities on the silver screen eventually ran out for these women stars as they
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aged in the 1950s one of the key avenues that opened to some of them was television.
For much of its history television has been constructed as ‘the poor cousin’ of cinema,
a shabby substitute for the glamour and allure of the big screen, and it is this territory
that constitutes the subject of our next essay. The small screen has always been kinder to
stars past their Hollywood prime, particularly women. The fact that from its early days
television provided a professional home to numerous ageing Hollywood women stars now
denied cinematic opportunities points to both the declining ‘value’ these women stars were
perceived to hold as they aged, and the lower cultural currency traditionally held by televi-
sion as it became a repository for Hollywood ‘has-beens’. With its smaller budgets, poorer
technological capabilities and modest, domestic site of consumption, television seemed
an apt space for women actors no longer deemed to be viable movie stars. More recently
such simple divisions are being increasingly challenged, however, and not just because
of the surge of ‘quality television’ drama and the growing sophistication of television
technology. Rather, television has become widely acknowledged as a space which enables
older women stars (some of them formerly film stars) to flourish: Kyra Sedgwick in The
Closer (TNT 2005–); Mary Louise Parker in Weeds (Showtime 2005–); and Glenn Close
in Damages (FX, 2007–), for example are all widely agreed to have produced some of their
finest work in their television roles. According to this outlook, it is not merely the case that
TV allows such stars to prolong their careers; rather, their presence on the small screen as
they continue to refine and expand their talents has enriched television itself.
In the second essay in this edition, then, Susan Smith’s revisiting of the later career
of Elizabeth Taylor on television suggests that, contrary to this historical reputation for
being a lesser medium than cinema, the small screen has long provided ageing women
movie stars with a potentially rich and rewarding performance space. As Smith observes,
in her heyday Elizabeth Taylor was the most celebrated woman actor in Hollywood. But
following a subsequent career in television that spanned close to three decades, in the latter
part of her life she had evolved into a highly caricatured figure of a decaying, excessive,
moneyed woman star. It is for her work in cinema, in films such as Cleopatra (1963), that
she is enduringly best remembered as an actor, while her ‘work in [television] has received
scant attention, usually being cited merely as proof of the decline in her acting career and
unworthy of her talents.’ In her essay, Smith dismantles this neglectful account of Taylor’s
career, in particular focussing on ‘a trio of television movies that are explicitly concerned
with the notion of the ageing female star making a comeback.’ As such, these are richly
self-reflexive texts (like the ‘elegaic grotesque’ movies revisited by Morey (2011) above),
featuring skilful, finely nuanced performances in which Taylor often seems to comment
on her own cinematic past and extra-diegetic self. Far from entering into ‘decline’ in these
films, Smith demonstrates how they enabled Taylor to develop her ‘performing identity and
overall star persona’ right to the end of her screen career.
 8 D. Jermyn

One of the few Hollywood woman stars who has managed to maintain a fairly consis-
tent screen presence from her twenties into her sixties today is Diane Keaton, in a career
which thus offers plentiful opportunities to examine how she has negotiated ageing as
part of her persona. In my essay I look specifically at how in recent years Keaton has
become a kind of ‘poster woman’ for a body of romantic comedy films which focus on
the desires of and for an older woman protagonist. Looking particularly at Something’s
Gotta Give (2003), for which she received an Oscar nomination at the age of 57, I argue
both that romantic comedy has become one of the few spaces in mainstream cinema where
older women audiences might encounter an appealing representation of themselves, and
that Keaton’s persona has meant she is ideally equipped to take up the role of mature
‘romcom’ heroine. I suggest that ‘for many audiences, Keaton carries what we might
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call a heightened (and gratifying) sense of history; that is, that her oeuvre has built
over the course of some four decades to shore up a recognisable performance style and
to enable numerous reflexive connections across her films.’ Her trademark garrulous-
ness and quirky style have become characteristic both of the ‘real’ Diane Keaton and of
many of her film roles, characteristics which also link her to the tradition of screwball
heroines. Her later romcom roles exploit this and their ‘nostalgia for the young Keaton
(which is to say the ‘old’ Keaton) who because of Annie Hall is inextricably tied to the
history of the romantic comedy, [make] her a particularly apt star for the mature rom-
com.’ Despite their willingness to pursue narratives in which an older woman is given
subjectivity, the ‘feminism’ these films might be said to proffer is far from unproblem-
atic, given their focus on (normative, white) heterosexuality and coupledom. Nevertheless,
while being closely associated with a mainstream genre that generally celebrates such
structures, as a never-married, older, lone adoptive parent to two young children, Keaton
has not followed these pathways in her own life. She therefore remains something of
the countercultural figure she was in the 1970s, an actor ‘who both in her films, and
extra-textually [exemplifies] how the figure of the ageing woman star remains a heavily
contested site.’
As noted above, it was striking to find how the call for papers for this edition was
dominated by proposals about Hollywood stars, and this perhaps says something about
how certain notions of female ‘stardom’ remain embedded in a conception of Hollywood
fame and ‘glamour’. William Brown’s essay on Charlotte Rampling (like Keaton, born in
1946) is therefore a welcome addition to this field, particularly since Rampling is such
a richly transgressive actor; a European star who blurs aspects of French/British identity;
who has enjoyed a film career which predates even Keaton’s beginning with The Knack . . .
And How To Get It in 1965; and who has become known for taking on roles as sexu-
ally active and/or aggressive women, a character ‘type’ she has continued to play as she
has aged. Brown’s essay explores Rampling’s star persona ‘in a series of French/French
backed films made between 2000 and 2005, in particular considering her as an ageing
transnational female star, both in terms of representation and performance’, a period which
includes some of her acclaimed work with director Francois Ozon. Brown suggests that
Rampling is an actor whose star persona operates in a particularly ambiguous, polysemic
fashion and who resists ‘becoming “just” an exoticised body’ in her portrayals of sexually
active older women. Instead, analysis of these films reveals how Rampling has repeatedly
produced ‘affective performances that both play upon but also elude the representational
aspect of her work’.
While the opening essays in this special edition all look in their way at different
instances of female ageing in the context of film stardom, increasingly in the contemporary
media landscape, celebrity stands to be won from a diverse range of contexts and media
 Celebrity Studies 9

and it is a priority for celebrity studies scholarship to examine the gendered implications
of these shifts. One potent example of this changing landscape is the emergence of reality
television as a significant arena for the acquisition of contemporary fame. As Holmes and
Jermyn argue, ‘female participants and contestants, as well as judges, have consistently
featured as the most keenly debated stars of reality TV formats, subjected to all the close
scrutiny and judgement such status entails’ (2012). Brenda Weber tackles this terrain in her
essay on the hugely successful global format, The Biggest Loser (Three-Ball Productions,
2004–), arguing that it demonstrates how ‘reality celebrity appears to offer a new position
of liberation and empowerment that is amplified by women’s embodiment in what I call
utopic infantile celebrity, or the belief that the youthful body confers dividends in opportu-
nity and fame . . . however, the promises of utopic infantile celebrity break down when they
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encounter ideologies of heterofemininty and maternity.’ In the series, overweight male and
female contestants of different ages must compete to lose the biggest percentage of body
weight in order to stay on the show and be in with a chance of winning the title of ‘Biggest
Loser’. In particular, Weber constructs a revealing comparison of the experiences of Ali
Vincent (32), the first female ‘Biggest Loser’ in 2008 and Helen Philips, at 48 the oldest
female ‘Biggest Loser’ in 2009. While Vincent was embraced as an inspiring role model,
Philips was subjected to public vitriol which suggested that at her age, she was an unde-
serving winner. Thus, the series demonstrates that even here, in this ‘new terrain’ of reality
celebrity, strictures operate to constrain ‘older’ women from taking up or holding on to the
mantle of fame.
One of the important interventions to be made by ageing studies into the cultural
presumptions surrounding ageing is to question the very process of how we define age
itself, and the inadequacy of merely ascribing a numerical figure to it. Woodward, for
example identifies ‘six meanings or definitions of age’, which she differentiates as bio-
logical; chronological; social; cultural; psychological; and statistical (2006, p. 163). Age
and ageing, then, as already outlined, are not objective, predetermined categories but rather
subjective and mutable ones, impacted also by gender, as a number of the essays here
demonstrate. In Weber’s essay, we see that contestants on The Biggest Loser can effec-
tively alter their age; their actual chronological age is less significant at the outset of the
series than what is variously termed their ‘real’ or ‘inner’ age ie. the accelerated biological
age of their overweight body, which can be reversed through improved diet and lifestyle
changes. For women contestants in particular this is posited as a highly aspirational objec-
tive; to some it brings renewed hope of improved fertility, but for all women – both on this
reality TV show and across popular culture and advertising – ‘reversing’ (or at the very
least delaying) the signs of ageing is the end goal of successfully managing one’s ageing.
In Betty Kaklamanidou’s essay, the hugely subjective nature of age, of what constitutes an
‘older woman’, and the pressures exacted by a neo-liberal regime which compels women
to stave off the signs of ageing, is illuminated further by her discussion of the recent rise of
‘the cougar’; a term first coined in the 1980s, to describe an older woman who seeks out
and dates younger men.
In her essay, Kaklamanidou explores and compares recent fictional film and TV repre-
sentations of cougars with two of the best known ‘real’ celebrity cougars to attract much
media interest for their ‘reverse May–December’ relationships, namely Demi Moore and
Courteney Cox-Arquette. In another instance of on/off-screen blurring, Cox-Arquette is
also the star of Cougar Town (ABC, 2009 –) (while in real life the age difference with
her husband was just 7 years, a gap which surely would not warrant mention if it were
the other way round). Kaklamanidou notes that superficially the surge of interest in such
relationships ‘in both celebrity culture and screen fiction may imply a sexual and social
 10 D. Jermyn

acceptance of the older woman–younger man relationship’. Her textual analysis of a range
of dramatisations and celebrity interviews, however, leads her to conclude that this is far
from the case; instead she finds a gendered double standard is still very much in place
in which cougars are frequently portrayed as preoccupied with their image, predatory and
afraid of ageing.
The edition concludes with Kirsty Fairclough’s analysis of how ageing female stars
have become one of the mainstays of contemporary celebrity gossip magazines and blogs.
She argues that the ‘primary function’ of sites such as perezhilton.com ‘is the hyper
scrutiny of the female celebrity’ and that within this, according to ‘prescribed notions
of postfeminist beauty norms [the] invisibility of ageing is a fundamental component’.
This is an industry which thrives on speculation about cosmetic surgery, derisive narratives
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in which female celebrities who have apparently had ‘work’ are either figured as ‘glam-
orous and desirable’ for getting it ‘right’, or as ‘monstrous and abject’ for going too far.
What is never in doubt, however, is their endorsement of ‘the state of endless transfor-
mation which is so revered in neo-liberal and postfeminist cultures’, something that can be
achieved through correct consumption of cosmetic technologies and procedures. Analysing
how the gossip industry has scrutinised and reviled women such as Nicole Kidman and
Heidi Montag, Fairclough concludes that ‘the locus of power and agency for women of
all ages now resides within displays of hyper-femininity, where power of the spending and
sexual varieties are inscribed as the only ones worth striving for.’
Together, then, the essays collected here draw a picture of a culture where the repre-
sentation of ageing and ‘older’ female celebrities is by turns seemingly hopeful and newly
affirming one moment, and destructive and retrograde the next. We hope that this edition
might thus serve as a rallying call to scholars in our subject area to engage more expan-
sively than we have as yet done with questions and issues that ultimately effect us all; for
whatever the other aspects of our identities that may differentiate us, we are all, always,
ageing.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to the editors of Celebrity Studies at Routledge who enthusiastically supported the concept
for this special edition from its inception, and to the authors featured here who approached it with
both industry and imagination. I owe a debt of gratitude to the colleagues and students who have
formed an audience for this work at various times and venues, including the Bournemouth University
Media School Post-Doctoral Research Group; the ‘RomCom, Actually’ conference at De Montfort
University, 2011; and the London Film and Media Conference, 2011. Thanks also to the colleagues in
the Department of Media, Culture and Language at Roehampton University for their support during
the period of research leave which enabled me to complete this project. This collection is for my
husband, Matt Wagner, for understanding how precious time is and yet putting so much of it my way;
and in loving memory of our friend, Kathy Dudding, who would have made an awesome old lady.

Notes
1. In the long term, though, this shift to later retirement and the economic downturn more broadly
may well have a negative impact on life expectancy. Similarly, the vision of consumerism among
older people engendered by Saga style marketing is far removed from the evidence of the preva-
lence of poverty among the 65+ demograph in the United States and United Kingdom, for
example.
2. There is, however, an important emerging body of further scholarship in the field, dealing
with film (Wearing 2007, Tally 2008, Negra 2009, Chivers 2011), ‘makeover TV’ (Heller
2007, Weber 2009) and cross-media forms (Negra 2009). In addition, in 2008 the innovative
 Celebrity Studies 11

AHRC-funded ‘Women, Ageing and the Media’ Research Network and Workshop project in
the United Kingdom produced a valuable archive of material, available from: http://www.wam-
research.org.uk/.

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