Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon and Sigourney Weaver on age
V magazine, Fall 2010
We've all heard the time-worn tales about women and Hollywood: Aging, typecasting, flops, "comebacks," and late-career exile. But tales aren't always true. And the careers of Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon, and Sigourney Weaver stand as evidence. These three actresses prove there's life and success waiting on-screen, onstage, and even in the bedroom. Well into a woman's 60s, 70s, and beyond
Jane Fonda
Even before All About Eve gave it a cultural touchpoint, the prospect of aging in Hollywood has been every actress's recurring nightmare, something to be dreaded, or battled. Jane Fonda has flipped that script, and for decades she's been preparing for the eventuality. "We always fear getting older when we're young," she says. "It's scary when you're on the outside. But when you're inside oldness, it's not scary."
At 72, the actress who became an icon of youthful sexbombitude (Barbarella) and complex strength (Klute; Coming Home) is still going unpredictable places. Having written one book on preparing for midlife (1987's Women Coming of Age), she's revisiting the subject with a book about the third act. She interviewed dozens of seniors and discovered "there's fabulous things about being older," she says. 'The older people get, the less scared they are. All the studies show you're not as anxious. People have less hostility, they have less negative emotions. They tend to see things from both sides. Very few things stress me out."
Fonda says that getting older in Hollywood has been easier than she expected. "But the easiness for me came from thinking about it so much," she says. "I prepared for it. I'm very healthy. I built a foundation of fitness starting in my 40s, and that just doesn't go away." It's a move that has come full circle: this year she's reviving her fitness empire with two new DVDs.
Fonda left movies in 1991, a move she attributes today to perimenopausal depression. "I looked at the last two films I did, Old Gringo and Stanley & Iris, and I could see it in my face—I was not at home." She married Ted Turner and lived with him in Atlanta for a decade before they split up in 2000; she still calls him her best friend. "Did I miss the business? Not one iota," she says. Writing her memoirs convinced her that she should return to films. "I realized I was changing a lot and becoming a happy, complete, embodied woman," she says. "Suddenly I realized, man, I want to get back into acting. I thought I could be better than ever. At my stage in life, the process is as important as the product. I want to be able to like the people I'm working with. I want to be able to have a good time."
Her comeback was Monster-in-Law, opposite Jennifer Lopez, an experience she recalls more positively than the reviews would suggest. "It's many people's favorite film of mine," she says. "I run into people who have seen it ten times. It was a happy, upbeat, over-the-top, exciting, wonderful movie. I had so much fun I immediately thought I wanted to do this again."
Ever optimistic, Fonda isn't blindly sanguine about aging in Hollywood. "I think it's very hard," she says. 'I think there's a reason that more and more older talented actresses are going into television, particularly cable television. Television tends to be more cutting edge, there's interesting writing, and it's a steady job. That's very welcoming to older actresses, and I'm happy about that. It's hard not to get stereotyped roles. And I tend to die in a lot of movies now. But that's all right."
This year, Fonda stars in two new films. In Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding, she's a pot-smoking hippie grandmother opposite Catherine Keener. Et si on vivait bus ensemble (What If We Lived Together?) is a French-language art-house drama (Fonda performs entirely in French) about two retired couples who decide to cohabitate. "It's about aging," she says. "There's humor and pathos in it." Also on her plate: two more DVDs, three books about adolescent sexuality (she also runs an Atlanta nonprofit), and an L.A. run of the play 33 Variations, for which she was Tony-nominated in New York.
"I love being productive," she says. "I'm never bored. I'm always coming up with new things, whether it's making a DVD or a book, or making movies. I always want to exteriorize what's going on inside of me. There's a lot that goes on inside. I like having an output that's meaningful to me."
Susan Sarandon
Susan Sarandon remembers a time in her 20s when she lost out on a movie role because she was married in real life. "Definitely an overwhelming lack of imagination," she laughs today. The limitations of studio executives didn't stop her, of course, and even at age 64, the Oscar-winning star of Dead Man Walking can't be accused of an uninventive professional mindset, she's franchising the ping-pong bar she recently co-founded, and her next film is a New Orleans-set drama directed by mumblecore kings the Duplass brothers. "They work in such a different way, and I want to live more dangerously, in terms of the process," says Sarandon, who plays the mother of two wayward brothers. "And I get to kiss Rae Dawn Chong."
Key to her cinematic longevity is Sarandon's refusal to take herself, or her career, too seriously. "I ended up in the business in such a funny way that it took me ten years to call myself an actor," she says. (In 1968, she accompanied her actor husband to a movie audition and was cast as the female lead.) "That's probably what helped me accomplish what I did. I wasn't really desperate or nervous. I didn't define myself by success."
She has a similar attitude toward aging. "I think growing older is tough for everybody," she says. "Even if you're not incredibly vain, you have to deal with death being so much closer and the way your body changes. If that's defining who you are, it becomes much more difficult. So I think it's really important to be in your life and surround yourself with things that get you excited, so you don't feel like life is passing you by."
What excites her is Spin New York (the ping-pong endeavor) and serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador; last season on Broadway, she starred in Exit the King, an experience that filled her with 'abject terror" initially. Now she's planning documentaries, the first about the regulars at Spin. "Early on, I made a good decision not to have a plan, to try to stay open to whatever crossed my path. I'd always be surprised when I'd take years off that I was able to find my way in again. Certainly, at my age, to be working is great," she says. "Of course, a lot of the parts I play now are either women dying or helping someone die. I have to get away from that. Starting with Dead Man Walking, I've been in a death loop for a while. But I'm very happy when I'm not working. It's a great framing of a career not to be desperate to work. And I feel like I'm still having an awful lot of fun."
What's clear is that the actress who became synonymous with earthy, intelligent sensuality in Atlantic City and Bull Durham continues to expand the definition of sex symbol. "I wouldn't want to be 20 now," she says. "I know so much more, and I'm much more comfortable in my skin, saggy as it is. When I hear young girls complaining about superficial things ... you're at the peak of your physical beauty right now! Just enjoy it and stop worrying about your thighs being too big. If you're upset with how you look at 25, life's going to be tough."
Sigourney Weaver
Three decades ago, Sigourney Weaver blazed a trail into movie history: Alien made her the first female action hero. Today, at 61, she's coming off a pinnacle year, having starred in Avatar, the top-grossing film of 2009, and scoring an Emmy nomination for the TV movie Prayers for Bobby. She didn't expect the trajectory. "I'm kind of astonished that I'm successful," she says. "That was never my goal. My goal was simply to be someone people wanted to work with because I was a team player and I was into it. I was always about what the experience was like, not how well the movie did."
That mindset has served her well, from comedies like Working Girl and Galaxy Quest to indie dramas like The Ice Storm and A Map of the World and blockbusters like Avatar. Fittingly for an ensemble player, she sees oneness, not separation, in age. "It's as good a time as any to be an actress over 40," she says. "If you look at history, if you look at the great books, there are all kinds of wonderful parts for people of all ages. People like stories about a huge range of different things, and there are all kinds of people needed to tell those stories. I don't feel that changes, no matter who's running the studios. They'll always need wonderful actors."
Weaver says she never worries about her career. "I was lucky in that my mentors were Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. They never stopped pushing the idea that work begets work. As they finished one thing, they'd go into another. I really admired that attitude: whatever the horse is, I can ride it. I never worry when they say 'there are no roles' or whatever. As long as people are telling stories, there will be great roles for all sizes, shapes, and sexes. You just keep moving and things come."
Her schedule has never been busier. This year, she heads to Italy to shoot a Bruce Willis action film, in which she locks horns with Henry Cavill. "In November, I'm going to sleep with Woody Harrelson," she chuckles, in the police drama Rampart. Paul is a Simon Pegg comedy that's "a paean to the Comic-Con geek within us all," she says. In Vamps, an Amy HeckerIing comedy about a pack of repentant vampires, Weaver plays the unrepentant leader. "I play the baddie in it, but I like her," says Weaver. "She's so honest. She likes being a vampire. Everyone else is trying to reform and she's like, ‘What's wrong with killing people?’ I love playing someone who's so in love with who she is."
In that sense, Weaver is in touch with the character she plays, though it didn't come easy. “I was this tall when I was 11," she says. "It took me a long time to grow into myself. If you're a late bloomer, and many are, you look back and say, I can't imagine it any other way. I can't imagine peaking in high school.
“I'm glad that I went for the long game. I just worked with Betty White. Talk about a long game. She's so sharp, so gracious, so hardworking. We'd all like to have Betty White's career. The business attracts so many vivacious people who are so much fun. That means we can all keep going together for a long time, I hope."