Clodagh Finn: It’s about time we celebrated our elder female icons

As author and film historian Kelly Robinson commented on Twitter: “Bugs me when an actress dies and people only post young pictures. I want to be like Gina Lollobrigida, not because she was dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world” in the ’50s, but because she ran for the Italian senate at 95.”

Let us write that sentiment in large letters and use it as a rallying cry to honour, champion, and celebrate older women.

Gina was 95 when she ran for the Italian senate because, as she explained, she was tired of hearing politicians arguing with each other without ever getting to the point. Sadly, she was not elected but the fact a woman in her 90s was on to “fight for the people of Italy”, to quote her gloriously feisty words, is worth noting.

She was also an accomplished sculptor, photographer, and documentarian. You’ll find those details in some of the tributes, but very few of them are illustrated with photos of her as an older woman.

Why is that?

Is it because we think beauty and age are inversely proportional — the former invariably ebbs as the latter rises? If that is the case, when is the magic cut-off point? Forty, 50, 60?

Speaking of women in their 60s, how refreshing to see Jennifer Coolidge (61) win a Golden Globe for her role as the funny, sexy and chaotic Tanya McQuoid in the HBO series The White Lotus.

During her acceptance speech, she put her (heavy) statuette on the floor and said this: “I can put this down, right? I don’t work out, you know? What I mean is I can’t hold it that long.”

She’s definitely on my list of older icons, though at the younger end of it.

There are many other famous actresses that I’d like to include too but here’s the rub — it’s almost impossible to find photographs of them as older women.

Try this interesting (and highly unscientific) experiment. What image comes to mind when you think of Ginger Rogers? Or Joan Crawford? Or any of the following: Ava Gardner, Ingrid Bergman, and Marlene Dietrich?

I’m particularly interested in an image of an older Marlene Dietrich because her career spanned several decades, from the 1920s to the 1980s. Then, when she was confined to bed in Paris in her later years, she remained politically active. German media reported that she ran up monthly phone bills of over $3,000 while talking to, among others, world leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

She also wrote poetry — an edited collected Nachtgedanken (Night Thoughts) was published in 2005 — and, according to her daughter, she “consumed philosophy, novels, biographies and thrillers”. When she died, aged 90, in 1992, almost 2,000 books were taken from her apartment in Paris.

That’s a fascinating insight into a woman who is mostly remembered for her (earlier) films and her anti-Nazi stance and support of the Allied troops during World War ll. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a photo of her after this period, though.

And that’s an unfortunate trend, particularly when it comes to famous women — and indeed men.

It’s heartening to see that so-called ordinary people are remembered with photographs of them in their later years when they die. I’ve noted a tendency in recent tributes, too, to record what women — and men — did throughout all their lives.

Can we not start to do a little more of that while women are still alive? In all the recent (healthy and vital) discussion of menopause, for instance, it strikes me that the focus is firmly on the difficulties of ageing, rather than the positives.

I’m not for a moment minimising the symptoms of menopause, nor the real and urgent need for dedicated clinics. I can’t say that loud enough. Though, let’s consider this too. There are many, many ‘pausers’ — to use a friend’s collective noun for women in their 50s – who work a number of jobs, embark on new courses of study, travel and/or train for marathons.

And where is the spotlight on women in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond? They are neither visible nor appreciated, which brings me back to the idea of compiling a list.

Put pen to paper now and record all the women in your own family, and in your wider acquaintance, who did so much in their later years that was either forgotten or underappreciated. 

Tell their stories. It’s a worthy tribute in itself, but it also paves the path ahead of all of us with glorious possibilities.

My own 55-year-old heart did a little jump when I read that Sheelagh Harbison’s (1914-2012) illustrious career as a medieval historian didn’t begin until she was 56. She enrolled as a mature student at Trinity College Dublin and she learned Latin from scratch.

Her students remember her as ‘Mrs H’ and she tutored in the medieval history department until the early 2000s, into her eighties.

This list of wondrous female elders should be long and expansive. And it should also embrace the sweep of history. I’d be inclined to start it in the 15th century with an inclusion honouring Katherine Fitzgerald, the old Countess of Desmond who lived to 140, and grew three sets of teeth during her lifetime.

Raise an eyebrow if you will, but Walter Raleigh, Elizabethan explorer and one-time mayor of Youghal, personally vouched for her advanced age and claimed to have met her. She was also said to have walked, aged 100, the five miles from her castle in Inchiquin to Youghal, and better still, all the way from Bristol to London to seek redress from Queen Elizabeth l — while dragging her ‘decrepit’ daughter of 90 in a cart after her.

Fanciful? Of course it is, though in real life she probably lived until she was well into her 90s. Her advanced age was considered part of a clever ploy by Sir John Fitz Edmund Fitzgerald, a member of the House of Desmond, to hold on to the castle at Inchiquin, according to 19th-century antiquarian Mary Agnes Hickson. The widow had the use of the castle for her lifetime and then it was to revert to Sir Walter Raleigh.

In any event, she was an elder with purpose and significant agency. And she’s top of my list of older female ‘icons’. Who’s on yours?