Meryl Streep defends Russell Crowe over 'women, act your age' comments
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Version 0 of 1. Meryl Streep has spoken out in defence of Russell Crowe following the Australian actor’s controversial claim that older women in Hollywood should learn to act their age rather than chase work better suited to their younger colleagues. Crowe caused online consternation after railing against “the woman who at 40, 45, 48, still wants to play the ingénue and can’t understand why she’s not being cast as the 21-year-old” in an interview published before Christmas. But Streep, whom the 50-year-old Crowe cited in his comments as a successful older female actor who played “age appropriate” roles, said she largely agreed with the Gladiator star. “The Russell Crowe thing, I’m so glad you asked about [that],” Streep said in an interview prior to London’s UK premiere for musical fantasy Into the Woods, in which the three-time Oscar-winner plays an old crone. “I read what he said – all of what he said. It’s been misappropriated, what he was talking about. He was talking about himself. “The journalist asked him, ‘Why don’t you do another Gladiator, you know, everybody loved that.’ He said, ‘I’m too old. I can’t be the gladiator anymore. I’m playing parts that are appropriate to my age. Then the conversation went on to actresses. So that was proving a point, that he was talking about himself, as most actors do. “That aside, I agree with him. It’s good to live in the place where you are ... You can put old age on; it’s a lot harder to take it off.” Streep, 65, revealed she had three times turned down offers to play witches which arrived on her doorstep when she turned 40, but was now happy to play one “because I felt it was age appropriate”. She added: “I felt it was time, and it was not time at 40. And also, I just had a political sort of reaction against the concept of old women being demonised and age being this horrifying, scary thing. I just didn’t like that. I didn’t like it when I was a little girl, I don’t like it now. “But this is a complex film. Every person is at war with themselves, everybody is after something and they’re willing to compromise everything to get it.” Meanwhile, the actor Jessica Chastain suggested Crowe kept “getting his foot stuck in his mouth”, in comments made at the National Board of Review Awards ceremony in New York on Tuesday night. “There are some incredible actresses in their 50s and 60s that are not getting opportunities in films,” she said, according to Cosmopolitan magazine. “And for someone to say there are plenty of roles for women that age ... [that] is not someone who’s going to the movie theatre.”Crowe’s initial comments, made in an interview with the Australian Women’s Weekly to promote his new film The Water Diviner, attracted online ire from bloggers writing for Jezebel and Junkee.com, amongst others. The Guardian’s Nosheen Iqbal wrote: “Crowe seems to have wildly missed the point about his colleagues – women who don’t have his privilege of being able to grow a gut, a temper, be perma-grizzled and still get jobs.” • Quiz: did these actors act their age? |