GEraldine James was on her way to play a grandmother in the BBC drama This Town when her agent sent her a message. “I was on the train to Birmingham,” the 74-year-old recalls. “And I got a text saying, ‘The RSC has offered you Rosalind in Stratford’ – you know, As You Like It. I said, ‘That’s crazy. What on earth are they talking about?'”
Rosalind is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved protagonists. She’s also a young woman, possibly a teenager, which is what made James’ lead role in last year’s production so surprising. “I remember thinking in the middle of rehearsals, ‘How will the audience react to this? What is a teenager going to think about a 70-year-old jumping around pretending to be 20?'”
Director Omar Elerian’s production, which featured older actors, was well received by audiences and critics alike – and reflected an emerging trend. While color- and gender-neutral casting is now relatively common on stage and screen, casting older women in younger roles is far less common. But this month, Joan Chen set her first Oscar records with her role in Didi. In the film, she plays the mother of a 13-year-old, even though she is 63 in real life. Director Sean Wang had to spend a long time convincing Chen that she was not too old. Meanwhile, Imelda Staunton wowed audiences at the London Palladium with her performance in Hello, Dolly. The Jerry Herman musical describes Dolly Gallagher Levi as “a middle-aged widow,” but Staunton is two years away from 70.
Although her age is not stated in the play, the role of Maria in Twelfth Night is usually given to someone in their twenties or thirties. In his upcoming production, Tom Littler, artistic director of the Orange Tree in London, has cast 78-year-old Jane Asher. Asher also starred in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the same theatre last year. “If you do the math,” says Littler, “Jane and (her co-stars) Clive Francis and Nick Le Provost were all a little older than the characters they were playing. They should be about 60.”
But the director “couldn’t resist the opportunity” to hire three of the best actresses in light comedy. “They are probably the most talented generation of actors we will ever see,” he says, “because they are the last generation to come through the repertory system.” Classical theater roles for women, he adds, tend to “dry up abruptly at quite a young age.”
For James, who loved her experience in As You Like It, the age-neutral casting opens up new possibilities. “Malcolm Sinclair (who played Orlando) and I have been thinking about what other Shakespeare plays we could do. I would love to play Juliet!” She would not be the first septuagenarian to fall in love with Romeo: Tom Morris cast Sîan Phillips in a production at the Bristol Old Vic in 2010.
James stresses that there are more roles for older women today than there used to be. However, she has one lasting criticism: “Leading actors on television have always had inappropriately young wives. But I think people are more demanding today. I think they want to see things they believe in.” Last year’s Bafta Award shortlist for Best Actress on Television proved her right: the nominations for Staunton, Sarah Lancashire, Kate Winslet and Maxine Peake were described as a “victory for mature women”.
Sophie Hallett of the Casting Directors’ Guild says age-inclusive casting is “a discussion we want to have with our members,” adding that “we are open to all aspects of inclusion and fair representation in the projects we receive casts for.” Men have always been given more freedom than women to play younger roles than they are – you can see this throughout the history of television and film. Last year, 49-year-old Joaquin Phoenix played a 20-something Napoleon in Ridley Scott’s epic. Josephine, who was six years older than the real Napoleon, was played by an actor 13 years younger than Phoenix.
“Diversity goes in every direction,” says James. “We need to continue to create roles for older actresses because we are representing more and more parts of society.” As Littler points out, older women are also an important target group of theater audiences. “In The Circle,” he says, returning to Maugham’s drama, “We just took the play seriously. And I came to the conclusion that it is relatively rare that older audience members see themselves properly represented on stage and not patronized by the text – that they are portrayed as people who have wishes, desires, resentments, lively minds, ambitions and all the complexity of being a human being.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to see older women taking on younger roles. Eighty-two-year-old Ian McKellen may have made headlines with his Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor three years ago, but Sarah Bernhardt played the same role in 1900 as a 55-year-old. Half a century later, Peggy Ashcroft was a 50-year-old Rosalind for the RSC. “I don’t know if there’s enough of a pattern to say that casting changes,” says Littler. “But there certainly should be – because there’s a huge wealth of talent among older actresses.”
