Meryl Streep.Meryl Streep, who at 62 is still in the ascendant. Photo: Simon Schluter
Meryl Streep's sterling performance as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady is set to pit her head-to-head in the race for Oscars glory with women three decades her junior. Streep is 62 in an industry that idolises youth and rations roles routinely for women over 40. So why is she — and a clutch of ascendant older actresses — suddenly defying time and the critics?

PERHAPS it’s too early to be talking about the 2012 Oscars but what the hell: we’re here now. Mostly, we’re talking about Meryl Streep. Nominated 16 times — five of them this century — she last won for Sophie’s Choice in 1983.

Now her new film, The Iron Lady, in which she plays Margaret Thatcher from her political ascendancy as prime minister through to a failing, forgetful old age, is being released just at the right time for the awards season. And rightly so. Yet again, she has exceeded herself in a performance that is empathetic but hard-edged, an exact impersonation of Thatcher’s speech and gestures but richly inventive as a dramatic construction of her character. Streep is 62 and her career, if we can legitimately compress her oeuvre into that word, is still in the ascendant.

Conventional wisdom has it that an actress’s career is effectively finished at 40, that there are no roles around for older women. But look at Streep. Look at Helen Mirren (66) or Judi Dench (77), two great British stage actresses who have only recently been getting the broad recognition in the movies they clearly merit. Mirren won an Oscar for The Queen at 61 and has just branched into action with Red and The Debt; Dench, a Bond regular as M, won her Oscar for portraying an earlier Queen Elizabeth in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love. The indie Oscar hit last year was The Kids Are All Right, starring Annette Bening (53) and Julianne Moore (51). And this year’s Oscar race offers the prospect of a battle between veterans: Streep versus Glenn Close (64), who takes on a bravura cross-dressing role in the historical drama Albert Nobbs, to be released Boxing Day.

Meryl Streep.Streep's Oscar-winning turn in Sophie's Choice.
Are we in the midst of a golden age for older women on screen? Not according to the popular perception. In a recent survey of more than 4000 filmgoers conducted by the UK Film Council, seven out of 10 women between the ages of 50 and 75 said they felt their age group was under-represented in films. Phyllida Lloyd, who directed The Iron Lady, agrees. ‘‘I know Meryl has been constantly surprised that roles keep coming her way,’’ she says. ‘‘But I still think there aren’t nearly enough representations of older women on screen.’’

Admittedly, the figures support this view. Two years ago, a survey by the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles found women aged 40 and over landed only 11 per cent of all the available film and television roles, while male actors of the same age nabbed about 25 per cent. Older women just aren’t supposed to be interesting, even as minor characters. Lloyd thinks this echoes real-life attitudes.
‘‘Nobody takes any notice of an old woman in the street,’’ she says. ‘‘You don’t know if that woman had an immense life, if she made a difference; you just assume she didn’t. From a feminist point of view, this was something we were passionately interested in. We were insisting on the value of an old lady.’’

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady
But there aren’t many women of any age in Hollywood’s recent plethora of comic-book adaptations, bromances and gross-out comedies, such as The Hangover and its identikit sequel. The few women who appear at all in these films are either killjoy wives sticking their rhinoplastied noses into whatever happened to their husbands in Vegas, or hotties who may or may not have talent but are cast solely for the excellence of their departing rear ends.

Almost a decade ago, Frances McDormand (54) was mulling over the wisdom of having agreed to be in a documentary about the plight of ageing actresses, Looking for Debra Winger. (Winger is 56 and, it is true, hard to find; she has recently been on In Treatment.) The problem, McDormand said, was not so much that there were no good parts for mature women as that there were no decent parts for women, full stop. Indeed, one reason we are now noticing middle-aged character actors such as Patricia Clarkson (almost 52) or Melissa Leo (51) is that they get to do things; they are not just there to succumb prettily to the hero.

Indeed, according to Hollywood’s unwritten rules, they can’t; they are too old to have sex. But is this actually a rule any more? Threeyears ago, three men vied for the hand of Streep, then 60, in the ABBA musical Mamma Mia!. That film was the biggest-grossing British film that year; as Streep said at the time, the greatest star of the supposed heyday of the ‘‘women’s film’’, Bette Davis, would be rolling in her grave. Certainly she would: Davis was 42 when she played fading Broadway star Margo Channing in All About Eve.

Helen Mirren.Helen Mirren. Photo: Michael N. Todaro
Now the reigning queen of the Hollywood rom-com, Jennifer Aniston, is 42. When Davis was 54, she had moved on to become the embittered old witch of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Not so long ago, Diane Keaton was luring Jack Nicholson away from younger women in Something’s Gotta Give; she was 56.

Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, which starred Streep doing much the same thing to Alec Baldwin, were both directed by Nancy Meyers. Only 17per cent of directors, producers and writers in Hollywood are women, according to a recent survey. Almost inevitably, most of the other 83per cent make films in their own image or, more often, an image that accords with their more upbeat fantasies: this is the entertainment business, after all. Judd Apatow, whose invigoratingly in-your-face comedies invariably cast women in the straight roles to let Seth Rogen get the laughs, admits that he gives men the funny lines. ‘‘I’m a dude ... so I lean men, just the way Spike Lee leans African American,’’ he told The New Yorker.

This year, however, the funniest film out of Hollywood was unquestionably Kristen Wiig’s brainchild Bridesmaids — she wrote it and played the lead, while Apatow produced — featuring a gang of gals who could fart, spew and generally gross-out as well as anyone in an Apatow movie. It only did a third of the sludgy The Hangover Part II’s box-office in its opening weekend in the US, which was taken as gloomy evidence that audiences don’t want or expect to laugh at women’s jokes. But Bridesmaids was also witty and intelligent where The Hangover Part II was formulaic and ham-fisted; perhaps audiences just like dumb.

Glenn Close.Glenn Close. Photo: Reuters
Moreover, to be fair, we have partly the gross-out genre — specifically, the fabulously foul American Pie — to thank for the acknowledgement of sexy mothers and, by extension, the rise of the cougar rampant. This really is a remarkable reversal in specifically older women’s screen fortunes. I remember going to see The Ploughman’s Lunch, a British film written by Ian McEwan in which thrusting young reporter Jonathan Pryce (then 36) was visited in his bed by his hostess, played by Rosemary Harris, 20years his senior. When he switched on his bedside light and we saw who his visitor was, a cry ‘‘errr, yuck’’ of righteous revulsion swept through the cinema.

This characterisation of the feminine grotesque has an undeniably rich cinematic history. In the 1967 film The Graduate, MrsRobinson’s (Anne Bancroft) illicit appetite for the son of her husband’s business partner Benjamin, played by Dustin Hoffman, was an affront to the natural order that threatened to ruin his young life. But Bancroft was only 36 at the time, a mere six years older than Hoffman. Likewise Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, a mad old bat who shamelessly pays for a younger man to keep her company, was played by Gloria Swanson when she was only 50; William Holden, who played hervictim, was a scarcely defenceless 32.

Well, we’re not there any more. This year Sigourney Weaver (62) appeared in the comedy Cedar Rapids as a schoolteacher involved with a 37-year-old former student who once had a crush on her; his problem is that she won’t commit. The film was something short of a smash but it is hard to imagine anyone saying ‘‘yuck’’ to a screen with Weaver on it. Mirren pumped out a very convincing sex scene with 35-year-old Sergio Peris-Mencheta in last year’s Love Ranch; Michelle Pfeiffer was 51 in Stephen Frears’ Cheri, where she dallied with a besotted Rupert Friend, then 28. Courtney Cox (47) is top cat in Cougar Town; she’s not exactly long in the tooth but it is television.

It is also true, of course, that we live in a time when women are able — one might say obliged — to look younger than they are. It is hardly a victory for middle-aged romance when the knife, Botox, fillers and weird injectables, combined with crafty lighting and a liberal use of body doubles, keep the middle-aged simmering at a perpetual thirtysomething. Plenty of immobilised faces such as Cher’s stand like Easter Island statues as testament to the violence done to women’s flesh in a quest to remain marketable. And there is certainly a small lurch of loss every time you hear that one of the dowager icons — Mirren or Julie Christie (70), say — has been surgically adjusted northwards.

Realistically, however, this is the entertainment business. It has never been at the pointy end of any kind of social change. It can’t be. Most films must run to a formula and work with stereotypes, as Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, told The Guardian newspaper recently ‘‘to generate the energy necessary in the short amount of time they have’’. The continuing vigour of this clutch of older women, however, has the solidity of an encouraging trend.

And it would be neat, not to say something of a triumph, for all of us who are women over ... well, over a certain age, to suggest that this year’s best actress Oscar competition was bound to be a race between the veterans, Streep and Close.

Actually, it won’t be. Albert Nobbs, originally a play, is a weak film; Close’s performance is thus less visible than it would be in a better vehicle. That performance, moreover, is necessarily restrained; Nobbs is a woman trying to pass as a man, locking up her feelings and keeping her face blank, which is not the sort of thing that attracts the Academy members’ attention.

At this point, Streep’s closest competition would seem to come from Michelle Williams, star of My Week with Marilyn. Williams is 31.

There are some striking similarities between Streep in The Iron Lady and Williams’ latest role. Like Streep, Williams is imagining a private world for a real person who was largely defined by her public persona. Marilyn Monroe’s sex-kitten act was, indeed, the performance of a lifetime.

Casting Williams, whose scrupulous lack of vanity is in everything she does — the trashy wife in Brokeback Mountain, a homeless woman in Wendy and Lucy, a sweating 19th-century pioneer in Meek’s Cutoff — was inspired.

And like Streep, Williams has an overriding seriousness. She may be young but, like the older generation now in the ascendant, she is here to stay. As to who will eventually take home the Oscar, however — well, as usual, that’s anyone’s guess.