Getting older is a part of life, and you can either fight it or embrace it. Aging is easier for some people than others, however.
For those in show business, gray hair and wrinkles can mean the end of their career. Instead of hiding from the limelight, however, these seven actors are shining in their 60s, 70s and 80s — and they have some advice for others.
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Jamie Lee Curtis
The daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis is Hollywood royalty. The queen of Halloween and the movies most associated with it, she is back on the big screen with “Halloween Kills.”
Curtis has no interest in people touting the “newest and most scientific ways to stop or slow the aging process.” In a 2012 essay for the Huffington Post, she wrote, “I am not talking about being mindful and changing habits that are not healthy. Smoking, overeating, too much sun, not enough sleep or water, but the actual process of aging is inherent in our humanness and despite the billions of dollars that are spent from every end of the ideological and financial spectrum, ethnicity, environment, climate ... it all ends up the same.
“We are in the chain of our ancestors, like it or not. These are truths to be celebrated.”
AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian
AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian
Denzel Washington
“When I turned 60 I looked in the mirror, and I said, ‘Denzel, this is not a dress rehearsal. This is life. It’s not a matter of how much you have, the question is what you’re gonna do with your talents, with your gifts,’” Washington, now 66, said at the 2017 AARP Movies for Grownups Awards. “I knew in my heart at 60 that I wanted to serve God, to serve my family and to see others do well.”
Jordan Strauss
Jordan Strauss
Alfre Woodard
Now 68, Woodard has been embracing the aging process for a long time.
“Age is what you decide you want it to be. I am still in motion here,” she told AARP Magazine in 2016. “I don’t want to put an expiration date on showing my jiggly legs at the beach, or say, ‘I’m over 50. I shouldn’t wear this.’ No, this is my 63-year-old butt, and I am free and happy. It has earned its freedom!”
Charles Dharapak / AP
Charles Dharapak / AP
Harrison Ford
He’s played two of the most iconic roles in cinema — Han Solo and Indiana Jones — even as those characters’ hair color changed from brown to gray.
“I just don’t think of age and time in respect of years,” Ford, 79, told People magazine. “I just have too much experience of people in their 70s who are vigorous and useful and people that are 35 that are in (lousy) physical shape and can’t think straight. I don’t think age has that much to do with it.”
Helen Mirren
“It’s extremely annoying to women of my generation and others following mine to have beauty products sold on a 15-year-old face. I don’t want to die young, so I’m going to get old!” Mirren, 76, told Grazia in 2019. “I think to stay engaged in life, to stay curious about life, to stay with a sense of learning about life, constantly. I think those are the things that, if you like, (help you) stay young.”
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Morgan Freeman
“I know it seems I’ve always been around, but my movie career didn’t begin in earnest until I was 50 years old,” the 83-year-old Freeman said at the 2017 AARP Movies for Grownups Awards. “These last 30 years have been the best of my life, and I’ve learned a lot on this journey. I’ve learned that with all the advantages of being a grownup come responsibility: responsibility to be true to yourself, to honor those who came before you, to leave the world a better place when you go.”
Iman
The iconic supermodel, 66, has two basic approaches to aging, she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2018. “Philosophically? Not giving a d***. Physically? Taking care of your skin.”
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