The most recent study from Annenberg also found that from Hollywood’s top 100 films last year, there were only four women aged 45 plus who featured as a lead or co-lead, and one was a voice character in an animation: Ginnifer Goodwin in Zootopia 2. None of them were women of colour. By contrast, there were 31 men in the same age bracket who qualified as leads or co-leads in these movies, including actors such as Anthony Mackie, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Dwayne Johnson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pedro Pascal and Tom Cruise.
“You can’t tell me that over this age on screen, there aren’t qualified female actors able to do [protagonist] roles,” Smith tells the BBC. “Really, this is discrimination. And I guarantee you, it’s also a finite group of women that are getting those opportunities to play those roles on screen,” she adds about the number of older actresses who might be considered able to carry a commercial, big budget film, as opposed to a more arthouse, “prestige” project.
Older female screenwriters, according to Kaiden and The Writers Lab co-founder Nitza Wilon, are equally still under-represented in popular film-making. In data given to the BBC, their study found that out of 511 US feature films released during 2025, only 12% were written by women over the age of 40 (and only 20% were written by women overall).
“The distance between the Academy Awards versus reality is quite far,” Wilon says. “I don’t think we can use the Oscars as a reliable source of what’s really going on in the world. The Academy Awards is a spectacle. It’s considered to be entertainment, not news. I’m excited by Demi Moore being 62 when she was nominated for The Substance, but she’s also a woman who does not look her age. Hollywood is a bubble. It’s not normal.”
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