Geraldine James was on her way to play a grandmother in the BBC drama This Town when her agent messaged. “I was on the train to Birmingham,” remembers the 74-year-old. “And I got a text that said, ‘The RSC have offered you Rosalind at Stratford’ – you know, As You Like It. I said, ‘Well that’s insane. What on earth are they talking about?’”
Rosalind is one of the most beloved of Shakespeare’s female protagonists. She is also a young woman, possibly a teenager, which is what made James’s starring role in last year’s production so surprising. “I remember, in the middle of rehearsals, thinking, ‘How are an audience going to relate to this? What’s a teenager going to make of a 70-year-old skipping about pretending to be 20?’”
Director Omar Elerian’s staging with older actors was well received by audiences and critics alike – it also reflected a coming trend. While colour- and gender-blind casting are now relatively common on stage and on screen, casting older women in younger roles has been far less frequently seen. But this month, Joan Chen has generated early Oscar buzz for her role in Didi. She plays the mother of a 13-year-old in the film, despite being 63 in real life. Chen needed a lot of convincing from director Sean Wang that she wasn’t too old. Meanwhile Imelda Staunton is delighting audiences at the London Palladium with her performance in Hello Dolly. The Jerry Herman musical describes Dolly Gallagher Levi as “a widow in her middle years”, yet Staunton is two years off 70.
Although her age isn’t given in the play, the part of Maria in Twelfth Night is typically given to someone in their 20s or 30s. In his forthcoming production, Tom Littler, the artistic director of the Orange Tree in London, has cast 78-year-old Jane Asher. Asher also starred in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the same theatre last year. “If you were to do the maths,” says Littler, “Jane and [co-stars] Clive Francis and Nick Le Provost were all a bit older than how the characters were written. They’re supposed to be about 60.”
But the director “couldn’t resist” the opportunity to cast three of the best performers of light comedy around. “They are probably the most theatrically skilled generation we will ever see,” he says, “because they are the final generation to come through the rep system.” Classic theatrical roles for women, he adds, tend to “dry up abruptly at quite a young age”.
For James, who loved her experience in As You Like It, age-blind casting opens up new possibilities. “Malcolm Sinclair [who played Orlando] and I have been working out what other Shakespeares we can do. I’d like to do Juliet!” She would not be the first septuagenarian to fall for Romeo: Tom Morris cast Sîan Phillips in a Bristol Old Vic production back in 2010.
James is keen to stress that there are more parts for older women than there used to be. She does have one enduring bugbear, though: “Leading men on television have always had inappropriately young wives. But I think people are more discerning now. I think they want to see things they believe in.” Last year’s Bafta shortlist for TV’s best leading actress bore her out: its nominations for Staunton, Sarah Lancashire, Kate Winslet and Maxine Peake were dubbed a “victory for mature women”.
Sophie Hallett of the Casting Directors’ Guild says age-blind casting is “a discussion we intend to open up with our membership”, adding that “we are open to all aspects of inclusion and fair representation within the projects we are asked to cast”. Men have always been given more licence than women to play younger than their age – witness, well, the entire history of TV and film. Last year, a 49-year-old Joaquin Phoenix played Napoleon from his 20s onwards in Ridley Scott’s epic. Josephine, who was six years older than the real-life Napoleon, was played by an actor 13 years Phoenix’s junior.
“Diversity goes in every direction,” says James. “We’ve got to keep creating roles for older actresses, because we do represent more and more of society.” As Littler points out, older women are also a key demographic in the theatre-going audience. “In The Circle,” he says, returning to Maugham’s drama, “all we did was take the play seriously. And it made me think that that is a relatively rare thing, for the elderly part of an audience to see themselves properly represented on stage and not patronised by the writing – to be represented as people who have wants and lusts and grudges and lively minds and ambition and all the complexity of a human being.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by older women taking on younger roles. An 82-year-old Ian McKellen may have stolen headlines with his Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor three years ago, but Sarah Bernhardt played the same role as a 55-year-old back in 1900. Half a century later, Peggy Ashcroft was a 50-year-old Rosalind for the RSC. “I don’t know whether there’s enough of a pattern to say casting is changing,” says Littler. “But it definitely should – because there is a huge wealth of talent among older female actors.”
• This article was amended on 14 August 2024 to correct the name of Nick Le Prevost.
