This dazzling, defiant picture of Helen Mirren is the perfect blueprint for growing old… but Vogue’s airbrushed supermodels prove we women are still in such a muddle about ageing

Helen Mirren, in a breathtaking set of new pictures, has done a giant favour to old women. I could say older women — a less scary way of describing those of us (I’m 71) who find it hard to come to terms with age — but I insist on old because, at 78, old is what Mirren is.

But not old as in frail, old as in invisible, old as in apologetic. I mean old as in dazzling, old as in defiant and old as in very beautiful indeed. Posed in profile for American luxury magazine DuJour, you can see every inch of her well-lived life in close-up.

The smattering of sun damage (she loves a beach), the lengthened earlobes, the sag of the neck, the vertical lines on her upper eyelids, the creases in her hands.

Retouched? Barely, I’d say. Some cosmetic surgery in the past, especially around the jawline? Possibly. But this is not a woman pretending to be anything other than she really is. These images scream, ‘Take me as I am, I’m 78 and I’m having a blast’.

How could she not? Her roles are as challenging and diverse as ever. Last month, Barbie premiered with Mirren as narrator, adding a deliciously ironic tone to the pink universe.

LINDA KELSEY: Posed in profile for American luxury magazine DuJour, you can see every inch of Helen Mirren’s well-lived life in close-up

And in Golda, which opens in Britain in October, she plays Israel’s first female prime minister as she leads the counter-attack in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war — at a time when Golda Meir was herself in her 70s.

Mirren has had her nose made larger for the role, her hair is grey and frazzled, her eyebrows grey and bushy, and she looks every inch the stereotype of an elderly woman. Vanity, thy name is not woman when it comes to Helen Mirren.

As editor of Cosmopolitan magazine back in the 1980s it would have been commercial suicide to put a woman in her 70s on the cover. I applaud the magazines that are doing it today.

If only the editor of Vogue had been as brave as the editor of DuJour.

For its September issue, Vogue features a bunch of 1980s supermodels on its cover. The women — Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford — are all in their 50s, and yet they have been so airbrushed they look like shop window mannequins; products of AI rather than living, breathing people.

Extraordinary, isn’t it, that the original supermodels, who graced almost every issue of Vogue in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, haven’t aged one bit in more than 30 years if these pictures are to be believed.

For its September issue, Vogue features a bunch of 1980s supermodels on its cover. The women are all in their 50s

It’s so blatantly dishonest, so insulting to women’s intelligence to think we might be hoodwinked into thinking the original supermodels haven’t aged in the three decades since they dominated the catwalk.

What point are these images making, other than to tell us that ageing — for women — is as taboo today as it ever was? It certainly doesn’t strike me as any kind of celebration of age.

Linda Kelsey… still looking fabulous at 71

I’d like to at least think that the supermodels were enjoying themselves on this shoot. But in most of the images they look stiff, severe and uncomfortable — as if afraid that by daring to smile, their tight skin might actually crack. As I look at Evangelista, 58, I’m reminded that for five years she was a recluse, after a fat-busting treatment she almost certainly didn’t need went disastrously wrong.

Within three months of the sessions she had between August 2015 and February 2016, she started seeing bulges on her chin, her thighs and above her bra. And then parts of her went numb.

Eventually, she was diagnosed with paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, a rare side-effect of the fat-freezing process CoolSculpting, leading the very fatty tissue she was trying to rid herself of to expand. Five whole years it took before she could face the world again.

In the meantime, she has undergone various corrective procedures. Her poor body has been hammered over and over, all in the name of age denial.

And now in Vogue we see her acting as though life has been nothing but perfect since she famously declared that she didn’t wake up for less than 10,000 dollars a day, and that her face and body have been successfully frozen in time.

LINDA KELSEY: Helen Mirren, it seems to me, never wholly conformed to beauty standards of the time

And why, I wonder, might the undeniably still gorgeous Cindy Crawford, 57, allow herself to be portrayed looking like her successful model daughter Kaia Gerber’s twin sister rather than her mother. In real-life paparazzi shots you often see the two looking touchingly sweet together, the age difference quite apparent.

It would be a thrill to see these women, alongside Naomi Campbell, 53, and Christy Turlington, 54, still modelling after all these years, as their current rather than former selves.

Why can’t they be portrayed for the mature beauties they have become, rather than succumbing to age erasure? We’re all still in such a muddle about ageing. And then we have Helen Mirren, and it makes women like me want to hug her.

If only those gorgeous supers had been as brave as Mirren, rather than letting themselves be stripped of most of the hallmarks of humanity. Mirren has clearly accepted her looks for what they are at this point in her life.

The age at which (if ever) the rest of us can learn to do the same has as much to do with personality as numbers. I know 35-year-olds who are hooked on Botox, women in their 70s having second or third facelifts. I’ve known lonely, menopausal divorcees who loathe their looks and lament their youth, then suddenly meet a man who fancies them and their faces light up with joy and vitality and they look ten years younger.

I know 95-year-olds who still dye their hair, have manicures and do full make-up every day. As one ninetysomething told me recently: ‘It’s called making the best of yourself. I accept my age but I don’t want to frighten the horses.’

Some women may cringe at this picture of Mirren, focusing only on the so-called ravages this image portrays as her youthful perfection has inexorably faded. For some it will be a stark reminder that old age is all about decay.

But what I have seen constant in the decades since Helen first sprang to acting fame is a spirit, a determination, an enthusiasm that has clearly not waned in the 48 years since I watched her on stage as a sexy rock chick in a play called Teeth ‘n’ Smiles at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1975.

Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford all grace the cover of British Vogue’s September issue

‘A force of nature,’ I remember thinking, as I left the theatre. And around the same time I recall the shoot for Cosmopolitan, where I was a junior editor at the time, that she did with a young photographer called James Wedge who was even more blown away than I was.

Their romance took off from there. The atmosphere in the studio had been electric, according to the art director. That’s the sort of effect Helen Mirren had then. And still does.

From feisty Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect to Queens Elizabeth I and II and Cleopatra, Mirren has always been bold and brave in her choice of roles.

I am convinced, looking at this portrait, that I see no sense of mourning for the peachy beauty of youth, no deep regret for the passing of the years, but an innate understanding of the flow of life from young to old, an accumulation not just of blemishes, flaws and lines but of experience.

For women, each age has something to offer that no amount of tweakments and procedures and fillers can deny.

Helen Mirren, it seems to me, never wholly conformed to beauty standards of the time.

She was curvy and sexy but never had the super-slim legs and ankles of other stars. She always seemed more real than many of her contemporaries.

And as she has aged, and her success has grown, she has spoken out about the way women are perceived in both the acting pro-fession and society.

As L’Oreal ambassador, she vowed to defy beauty standards for older women, insisting her generation has been subject to ageism for far too long.

During the Covid lockdown she let her hair grow to far below her shoulders. Women, after a certain age, aren’t supposed to have long hair, she said at the time. ‘I thought, you know what, it’s pretty cool. I think I’ll stick with it for a little while.’

And earlier this year she turned up at the Cannes Film Festival with her hair dyed blue, proper blue (no resemblance to a little old lady blue rinse.)

I’d be lying if I said I never despaired at my own wrinkles. When I look back at photographs of myself as a young woman I can’t help thinking, was that really me?

But what I love about these pictures of Helen Mirren is her acceptance of what is, and they make me determined to keep trying to accept ageing too.

Source: Read Full Article