Actor Juliet Stevenson criticises lack of roles for women in their 50s
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Version 0 of 1. The actor Juliet Stevenson has criticised the lack of roles for women in their 50s, saying she spent much of her career playing "not very interesting women". The star of Truly Madly Deeply, who will return in the second series of the BBC1 drama The Village, said women were often relegated to the periphery of TV and film drama, a concern also expressed by fellow actors Emma Thompson, Amanda Redman, Julie Walters and Zoë Wanamaker. Stevenson, 57, told Radio Times the situation for female actors was "getting better, but not hugely". "There are a few roles that are great and meaty for women in their 50s and I'm lucky that I sometimes get offered them. Nevertheless, I spend quite a lot of time playing not very interesting women … they're not at the centre of the action. They're not driving the narrative." Stevenson, who plays Lady Clem opposite John Simm and Maxine Peake in Peter Moffat's Bafta-nominated drama, has previously called on TV producers and commissioning editors to reverse their attitude towards older women, saying: "We need to let them get beyond 50." Redman, the former star of another BBC1 drama, New Tricks, said earlier this year that there was "consistently nothing" for women of her age on television. "Any woman of my age would say that they feel invisible as women. You're ignored because you're not old and kooky, and you're not young and sexy," said 56-year-old Redman. "And that's how the powers that be in casting tend to think as well, unfortunately. Emma Thompson is probably the only person I can think of who's my age and working and she's had to write stuff for herself." Thompson, who won an Oscar for her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, said this year that she "longed for the day where we don't have to talk about our age as actresses. "For women a lot of the time, the only power that they do have in their roles on screen is the sexual power," she said in an interview in April. "So when that sexuality becomes older, and therefore a great deal more threatening, the roles dry up – because women don't have access to the kinds of power that create the kind of story that people are writing about. "The roles of women in life – in political life, business life, everything – are absolutely mirrored by what we see in cinema." The BBC has pledged to put more older women on screen to better reflect the diversity of its audience. One of the stars of the BBC1 drama Last Tango in Halifax, Anne Reid, used the programme's Bafta win to thank the corporation for "at last" doing a love story about people over 35. "Some of us do have quite interesting lives when we get to 70," she said. Wanamaker, 65, said last year: "It's difficult to get work as I age, but it is always thus. Even Shakespeare stopped writing about women while his men aged. The young look nicer, but older women are more interesting, with more to offer and better stories to tell. It's similar in politics: there aren't many women because they find the fighting a bit galling and give up." Stevenson's other recent credits include the BBC1 fantasy drama Atlantis and BBC2's White Heat and The Hour. The Rada-trained actor also appeared in Channel 4's acclaimed The Politician's Wife. |