If you’re an actress, you already know you face a discriminatory dead zone between the ages of 30-60 years old in the movies and on television. Some actresses, who truly care about their craft, turn to the live stage to help fill that 30-year career void.
The Hollywood discrimination against actresses goes something like this, “Nobody wants to see a regular woman. Audiences want to watch teenagers and old women. Anything in-between is too ordinary.”
That attitude means thousands of young actresses are tossed away as soon as they enter their late 20s. If they’re lucky and well-trained, they might be able to make a comeback when they’re 60 to play crazy aunts and grandmothers — but that sort of decades-on-hold of a career kills many more actresses than it salvages.
There are always exceptions — Meryl Streep is now 60 and she’s worked a much over the last 30 years as she wished to — but few actresses have Streep’s staying power.
The lucky and the prescient actresses turn to the theatre as a refuge during their 30-year ostracism, but the pay is never as good as the movies, and your audiences dwindle the farther you move away from Los Angeles and New York.
Men between the ages of 30-60 have no trouble finding acting jobs. The industry appears to believe actors “age better” on screen than women do
— and that makes for some strange romantic relationships where a 50-year-old star is shooting make out scenes with an actress entering her twenties — and that imbalance of perception versus reality is one way how Hollywood, and its inbred prejudices, ruin American social mores and values.