WHEN you're a beautiful woman, growing old is never easy – despite still being glowingly gorgeous, Catherine Zeta Jones sounds like she's having a mid-life crisis.
It can't help that she's looking down the barrel of 40, but Wales's answer to Ava Gardner seems to be panicking about the onset of middle age. Back in March, she said she was too old for raunchy sex scenes. "It's a natural progression," she said of h
er maturing career. "I'm 38 years old and I'm going to play more mums than sex symbols. I'm too old to play younger characters."
Fair enough, you may think, but only days later she claimed the above was "a misquote" and that although "these roles are coming in where I'm playing more moms", we could look forward to "seeing a lot more of me, put it that way. I haven't actually reached my sexiest point."
Now she's 39 and maintains she can go on being a sex symbol – last week she said that because "the classic Hollywood stars went on well into their thirties and never had surgery" she could, too.
Catherine, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that you were right first time. But the good news is that although it might mean the end of your career as a sex symbol, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of your career. So please, stop running around like a spooked spaniel – turning 40 isn't the end of the world if you know how to play your new role for all it's worth.
I never thought I'd have to give an Oscar-winner a lecture on the history of Hollywood, but here goes. First of all, practically all the great, classic film stars had surgery. The list is endless, and those are just the ones we know about. Don't assume that someone didn't have serious work done just because they appear on screen in black and white.
Second, and most important, precisely which "classic" Hollywood stars are you referring to? You stipulate that they went on "well into their thirties", so you probably mean the likes of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. That's fair enough – these stars were even more popular at 40 than at 30 – but you're missing one very fundamental part of these ladies' appeal: they were never sex symbols.
Sure, they could be glamorous and seductive – Joan, especially, had quite a temptress thing going in the early 1930s – but essentially, these great stars were women's women. They starred in women's films, giving life to women's dreams. Fulfilling male fantasies was merely a sideline.
If you scrutinise the real sex symbols of Hollywood's Golden Age, the story is very different. Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe were both dead long before they had to deal with being 40. Lana Turner managed to avoid the "suicide blonde" tag, but her career as a sex-bomb had petered out by the time she was 45. (And by then she'd been playing mothers for quite a while.)
Let's look at Ava Gardner, the star whom Jones most resembles: at 36 she was desperately trying to stay afloat by appearing in Italian films (no kudos in that for a Hollywood star) and after 55 Days At Peking she unwillingly waved goodbye to playing central, sexy roles aged only 41.
So, chin up Catherine (all of them), you're already doing better than many of your predecessors, but there's no shame in acknowledging that soon it's going to stop.
For God's sake, don't get desperate and start taking your clothes off to prove you've still got "it". Let the boys remember you in your prime. Follow Susan Sarandon's example and move from sexy roles to dramatic roles while still being a sexy woman. Helen Mirren hasn't stripped for her art for decades, but even after years of playing detectives, housekeepers and dowdy monarchs, everybody still wants to see her in a bikini off-screen.
To continue with dignity, you must acquiesce to the inevitable. Men won't fancy you as much when you're old – fact – so if you refuse to relinquish the sex-symbol tag, you'll end up like Lana and Ava. But if you stay glamorous and take the right roles, women will love you for ever, like we still love Joan, Bette and all the great, golden girls.
So relax, Catherine. The key to a long career is appealing to women, like those stars you admire. Men may stop wanting you, but so long as women keep on wanting to be you, isn't that good enough?
