The Sunday Times today is full of stylish women over 40. Really, it is. Amazing eh? Well not to us, obviously, we know how talented and fabulous we are, but it is a pleasant change to see that the leading Sunday broadsheet acknowledges it too.
First we have the dubiously young looking Demi Moore, who at 46 is back in a movie (Flawless, directed by Michael Radford who did the brilliant Il Postino, out Friday) after some time away looking after her three kids. Apparently it was them that got her back into films by asking her if she was ever going to work again, presumably in that annoying whiney way kids have when they’re trying to get you out of the house so they can have more friends around and make more mess.
And then there’s Cindy Crawford, back modelling again at 42, who says “Baby boomers are getting older. They like seeing familiar faces again because it makes them feel good about themselves. Obviously people of 40 and 50 do not look the way they did when I was growing up inIllinois, these people look after themselves”. Too right Cindy, we’ll never look like her but we like having her around as an (admittedly warped) goal.
But the best example for us of a fabulous older-achiever is Judy Cramer (above), the woman behind the musical Mamma Mia!, who at 51 appears to have wiped the floor with Hollywood and is on target to make the recent film adaptation overtake Titanic as the biggest grossing film of all time.
And she’s done it because she totally understands her market (it is a story about three middle aged women) because she and the team who put the film together are the market of “North of middle age” as Judy calls them.
She recognised that the demographic of older women would love the story, had the Abba songs engrained in their heads from when they were growing up and were affluent.
"Old is gold”, as the (female and older) head of Universal Pictures, Donna Langley, who backed the film, said. While we may quibble with the use of the word old, we couldn’t agree more.
Read the full article on Judy, by Giles Coren at The Sunday Times
