Life

In Age Of Macron, Why Is 43-Year-Old Actress ‘Too Old’ For Wife Role?

Actress Julianna Margulies with husband Keith Lieberthal Image by Getty Images

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy May 9, 2017

In recent controversy: “Orange Is The New Black” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” actress Jamie Denbo — who is, let the record state, Jewish — tweeted her dismay at learning that she is considered, at 43, considered too old to play the wife of a 57-year-old actor. Too old, also, to play an 18-year-old’s mother.

So it goes in entertainment. (Exception: “Midsomer Murders”, where the more strapping the young man, the more certain one can be that he’s about to emerge from the boudoir of a woman old enough to be his grandmother.) But not, or not necessarily, in real life: If a recent New York Times trend piece (inspired by “the 24-year age gap between Emmanuel Macron, 39, […] and his wife Brigitte, 64”) is to be believed, older women and younger men are pairing off all the time these days. Perhaps by the time Denbo is 57, 43-year-old actors will be told they’re too far over the hill to be paired off with her.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at bovy@forward.com. She is the author of “The Perils Of ‘Privilege’”, from St. Martin’s Press. Follow her on Twitter, @tweetertation

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.

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