Russell Crowe Under Fire For 'Actresses Should Act Their Age' Remarks

Russell Crowe has come under fire for comments he made during a recent interview in which he criticised female actors for not wanting to play roles appropriate for their age.

The ‘Noah’ star took aim at those who have complained that roles in Hollywood have dried up as they have got older.

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He added that the same applies to male actors wanting ‘younger roles’.

“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 ingenue, and can’t understand why she’s not being cast as the 21-year-old,” he told the Australian Women’s Weekly.

“Meryl Streep will give you 10,000 examples and arguments as to why that’s bulls**t, so will Helen Mirren, or whoever it happens to be.

“If you are willing to live in your own skin, you can work as an actor. If you are trying to pretend that you’re still the young buck when you’re my age, it just doesn’t work.”

Crowe, who is promoting his new movie ‘The Water Diviner’, went on: “I have heard of an actress, part of her fee negotiation was getting the number of children she was supposed to have lessened.

“Can you believe this? This (character) was a woman with four children, and there were reasons why she had to have four children – mainly, she lived in a cold climate and there was nothing to do but fornicate all day – so quit arguing, just play the role!

“The point is, you do have to be prepared to accept that there are stages in life. So I can’t be the Gladiator forever.

“It’s like my friend, Eli Roth, told me: It’s not the 43 years in front of the camera, it’s not the 25 years doing lead roles, you’ll find the thing that gives you the empathy, the power, when you’re making this film is the fact that you’re a father.”

Despite Crowe’s claims, Helen Mirren has decried Hollywood’s attitude to older female actors in the past.

“I’ve seen too many of my brilliant colleagues, who work non-stop in their 20s, their 30s, and their 40s, only to find a complete desert in their 50s, and no work means no income,” she said while picking up a gong at the Women In Entertainment awards in 2010.

“I resent having witnessed in my life the survival of some very mediocre male actors and the professional demise of some very brilliant female ones.

“With all due respect to you many brilliant and successful women in this room, really not too much has changed in the canon of Hollywood filmmaking that continues to worship at the altar of the 18- to 25-year-old male and his penis.”

Soon after making the remarks, a number of writers took exception to Crowe’s viewpoint.

“Funny how Crowe doesn’t bother to offer any opinion about the mind-boggling legacy of Hollywood men playing romantic leads to women 10, 20, 30, and sometimes 40 (!!!!!) years younger than them,” wrote Rebecca Rose on the Jezebel website.

“Because it’s clearly the sad old women daring to pretend they are outside their actual birth ages that are ruining Hollywood… Thanks Crowe for reminding us, yet again, that women are always held in contempt for doing anything remotely similar to what their male counterparts do without reproach.”

Junkee.com blogger Amy Gray used stats from a 2013 survey on gender in the movies, adding: “The ‘ingenue’ roles Crowe refers to are the only ones readily available for women; on the flip side, the majority of male characters in film and TV are aged between their 30s (27%) and 40s (31%).

“That could be because we’re more likely to want to watch lead characters based on their f**kability – and the older a woman gets, as any executive will tell you, the less f**kable she becomes.

”Even if women should ‘act their age’, Hollywood won’t let them.”

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Image credits: Getty/Universal