At last - a great year for movie actresses, and older ones at that

Heroine chic
The Oscar race will showcase a golden generation of actresses — in films that do their talents justice. What a refreshing change, says Christopher Goodwin/UK Sunday Times

Every year at this time, a familiar lament can usually be heard in Hollywood: why are there so few good parts for women, especially for older actresses? This year, though, as the trade press begins to fill with ads touting the Oscar contenders, it’s becoming clear that an amazing number of actresses — many of them British, and many beyond the age when Hollywood normally puts them out to grass — will be in the running in January. The 2007 shortlist will highlight the richest array of female talent in more than a generation.

The roles are also incredibly varied: Helen Mirren as a dowdy but surprisingly sympathetic monarch in The Queen; Meryl Streep as the nightmarish editor in The Devil Wears Prada; Penelope Cruz as a mother with a terrible family secret in Volver; Kate Winslet as an adulterous housewife in Little Children; Julie Christie as an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Away from Her; Sienna Miller as the drugged-out Warhol icon Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl; Beyoncé Knowles as a diva-esque 1960s soul singer in Dreamgirls; Nicole Kidman as the controversial photographer Diane Arbus in Fur; Renée Zellweger as Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter; Naomi Watts as a doctor’s wife coping with marriage and the tropics in The Painted Veil; Annette Bening as a mentally unstable mother in Running with Scissors; Ashley Judd as a thirtysomething single woman in Come Early Morning; Charlotte Rampling as a sex tourist in Heading South; Judi Dench as a nosy teacher in Notes on a Scandal; Cate Blanchett, in the same film, as a teacher having an affair with one of her students, and in The Good German as a woman attempting to escape her past; Brittany Murphy trying to control the downward spiral of her life in The Dead Girl; even Abigail Breslin, the delightful young star of Little Miss Sunshine, as Olive, who is so keen to appear in a beauty contest.

There are so many great leading parts for women this year that some of these actresses may end up competing in the best supporting category, where they could find Emma Thompson as a suicidal author in Stranger than Fiction; Frances de la Tour in The History Boys; Vera Farmiga as a mobster’s girlfriend in The Departed; Jennifer Hudson as a soul singer in Dreamgirls; Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee in Infamous; and Sharon Stone as a beautician in Bobby, about the day Robert F Kennedy was murdered. (Stone is in the unlikely position of also being the frontrunner for worst actress at the Razzie awards, for Basic Instinct 2.) Yet the vast majority of these films are made by independent companies. The perennial criticism of the major Hollywood studios — for not creating good parts for women, and for not making films that women (and I don’t mean teenage girls) want to see — is still valid. This year, for example, women were not the protagonists of any of the films nominated for best picture. Reese Witherspoon won best actress Oscar for playing June Carter Cash, the endlessly supportive wife of Walk the Line’s real subject, Johnny Cash. And the only actress over 50 to win an Oscar in either acting category in the past two decades is Judi Dench, best supporting actress for Shakespeare in Love in 1999.

“It’s Hollywood’s fault,” says Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director of Volver, who knows a thing or two about creating great roles for women. “In other countries, we encourage diversity and want to tell stories about all kinds of women. In the past decade, you can count the number of Hollywood dramas that have revolved around women. The studios have forgotten that women are fascinating, more than just mannequins.”

There was a time — really, up until the mid-1950s and the advent of television — when many of Hollywood’s biggest money-spinners were “women’s pictures”. Many of the top stars of those years were women: Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn among them. Even a few years ago, the studios were still in the business of making films for women: the Meg Ryan comedies of the late 1980s and early 1990s; more recently, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Runaway Bride and Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts; and Legally Blonde and Sweet Home Alabama, starring Witherspoon. But in the past three or four years, even the romantic comedies that used to be made starring women, and with the female audience in mind, are now being made for men: witness Wedding Crashers and Meet the Fockers, where the women are little more than sexed-up ciphers.

“The major studios are going after what they call the ‘four quadrants’,” says Laura Bickford, the producer who made Traffic as a studio film and Fur with independent financing and distribution. “And they have made a business decision that for their $150m movies, they have to have the teenage male ‘quadrant’.” This model breaks the audience into four parts: men under 25, men over 25, women under 25 and women over 25. Because budgets are now so high, the studios calculate they need to hit as many of the quadrants as they can — all four, they hope. But their research shows that whereas women will go to see “guy” movies, men won’t be seen dead in the queue for a “chick flick” — hence the focus on teenage boys.

But there is a silver lining. Bickford believes that, lamentable as the studios’ neglect of the female audience is, it may be the main reason we are now seeing so many terrific films starring women. “As the studios have become more intensely focused on male-oriented blockbusters, it has opened up a huge area for the independents to exploit. Clearly, the studios have underestimated the potential buying power of the adult — non-teenage — female audience. These movies are showing that. Anybody who doesn’t like watching Bening or Streep or Mirren is blind. And the thing about the baby-boom female audience is that if the price is right, it is very lucrative.” The Devil Wears Prada, for instance, which was targeted strongly at older women, has taken $125m at the US box office, much the same as Mission: Impossible III, which cost five times as much to make. You do the maths.

It’s also becoming clear that the recent success on television of female-driven dramas and comedies such as Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City and Grey’s Anatomy has been a huge factor in spurring at least the independent companies in Hollywood to make films for the (mainly older) women who are watching them. “Television is showing that the audience is there for dramas that depict more complicated women — and by complicated, I mean anyone over 25,” Bickford says. “Blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean have a lot of parts for men, older men, as character actors,” she points out. “Where are the great women’s roles in those movies? But these actresses have to work, so they are almost forced to seek out more interesting and edgy roles, as this year’s films show.”

Daniel Battsek, the Brit who now runs Miramax, agrees. “There is this group of wonderful actresses — Mirren, Streep, Redgrave, Bening and Christie, to name just a few — who don’t stop being great just because they’ve reached a certain age. In fact, their performances are even richer because of their age and experience. This amazing pool really demands that movies be found that are appropriate to their talents.”

Mirren, who is 61 and the frontrunner for the best actress Oscar, is philosophical. “There are fewer roles,” she acknowledges, “but the roles get better as you get older. They become deeper, more complicated and more interesting. It’s those young roles that are tedious.”