‘I Can’t Play the Gladiator Forever’

Russell Crowe doesn’t buy the idea that older actresses are at a disadvantage in Hollywood and advises his female counterparts to try for more suitable roles, but the figures show that Hollywood’s image of women is nude and young.

Russell Crowe doesn’t think older actresses are at a disadvantage in Hollywood. In an interview by the Australian women’s magazine Women’s Weekly, the 50-year-old Oscar winner offered advice to the actresses of his generation saying, “To be honest, I think you’ll find that the woman who is saying that the roles have dried up is 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.”

Hollywood has been discussing the disadvantages for older actresses for some time, and Crowe has now stoked the fires of the sexism debate that began last year when superstars, like Cate Blanchett, ignited it with her accusation of Hollywood’s age discrimination practices.

The industry’s lastest shock came in the wake of Renée Zellweger’s plastic surgery that prompted a discussion of what drives actresses to take such extreme measures. Jessica Chastain dryly remarked that if Crowe believed what he said, he wasn’t going to the movies enough.

The statistics agree with Jessica Chastain.

And she’s right. In 2014, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, also known as UN Women, tallied the numbers and found that only one-third of speaking roles internationally went to women, and that ratio fell to around 1 in 4 for American or British productions. The UN Women organization also found equally depressing results when the type of roles was also examined. It’s a mild exaggeration to say that when women appear on screen, they’re nude, or semi-nude. But in any case, they’re mostly young, pretty and unemployed. As abstruse and fantastic, as many Hollywood films are, they reflect reality – or better said, a super reality – the reality of an overly emphasized, distorted world.

Meryl Streep, who identifies herself as a feminist, came to Crowe’s defense this week. “I read what he said – all of what he said. It’s been misappropriated, what he was talking about. He was talking about himself,” she said.

Crowe is currently portraying a farmer who travels to Turkey after World War I in an attempt to find his missing son. He’s by no means a gladiator in that role, but his sex appeal is apparently good enough for Hollywood since the script calls for romantic interest between Crowe and model Olga Kurylenko, who was born in 1979.

And Meryl Streep’s latest role? In “Into the Woods,” she plays an old witch.