The Old and the Beautiful
Is it wrong, do you think, still to find Helen Mirren hot? She is a dame, after all, and although in American screen noir dames have always been young and feisty and glamorous, a contemporary British Commonwealth dame is more likely to be wizened and a bit shaky. (I’m picturing dames like Dame Elizabeth Murdoch here, and for as little time as possible.) So, am I a bit … creepy to remain so firmly devoted to Helen’s erotic powers? Many thinking men (excluding gay thinking men, presumably) have had a bit of a thing for Helen at some point, but many must also by now have hit the wall where erotic Helen has, in a stately fashion, faded into pensionable Helen.
In the seventies and eighties, she audaciously stripped at the flimsiest excuse whilst casually demonstrating she was one of the best actresses in the world. She has been an exuberant and accommodating cinematic nude, and when she won her Academy Award a few years back, I wondered if she’d maybe, from habit, consider letting her dress fall off during the acceptance speech.
Her libertarian attitude, we should also remember, has not been at the behest of any of the European auteurs, those sweaty men who have never gotten over their teenage fantasies of curvaceous women strolling through the piazza carrying onions. When working with ‘big jugs and bicycles’ pervy directors of arthouse softcore, actresses must sign on for frequent and lubricious scenes sans peasant garb. In sharp contrast, you wonder if Helen has to sign a similar contract so she’ll stay clothed.
In her Oscar-winning role, you’ll remember, she portrayed the Queen of England. Not the angry, passionate redhead Elizabeth A; not the Blanchett version. No, she was Queen Brenda, the current Elizabeth 2.0, the one constructed from acrylic and Meccano with the automatic hand. For a lot of men, The Queen was the ‘frump bump’ moment when it couldn’t be denied that Helen the tigress was no more. The real Queen is about 105 years old, but you’d have to admit there was no call for Industrial Light & Magic, or prosthetic flesh experts (such as those who built Nicole Kidman’s bizarre Virginia Woolf nose, a schnozz for which she too was handed an Oscar) to prepare Helen for the role. The screen Queen resembled Helen Mirren, but Helen just about made herself icky enough to turn me off.
And I couldn’t bear her Yorkshire accent in that movie where the ancient harridans of some cosy village decide to do a nude calendar. I was happy for Helen to have only one sort-of-nude scene in that one, the payoff being that there would be no similar undressing by Julie Walters.
I saw a photo of Helen recently, a not-quite-in-focus but revelatory pic snapped last year by some paparazzi scumbag on the Costa Del Something. She’s alighting from the sea in a red bikini and, oh my lord, she looks fit. So, can you get back to me when she hits seventy? Maybe I’ll have shrugged her off by then.
Let’s up the ante now and examine the case of the, to say the least, elegant and mature Julie Christie. I love Julie Christie. She was both the personification of the new freedoms of the sixties, and a talent who, with no experience, shone as a natural and fully formed actress from the moment she first stepped in front of a camera.
Jools has always been a bit bolshie: an actively political supporter of unionism; a seditionist angling for the closing of Gitmo; a voice for the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. She’s got all the anti-nukes, eco-protection boxes ticked. A real bloody leftie is our Jules. Sexy in itself, I find. Oh, and did I mention she’s unbearably, exquisitely beautiful?
In 1973, Julie was a participant in a sex scene often voted the hottest in cinema history, but I’m uncomfortable with my Julie having sex with another man. While that’s bad enough in itself, the famous Don’t Look Now Venetian sex scene has the massive upchuck of a turn-off of the baring, filmed from various angles, of Donald Sutherland’s disgusting bony excuse for an arse.
For Julie’s recent portrayal in Away From Her of an old woman with Alzheimer’s – that’s the disease, of course, where you can’t remember where you put the keys down or, more commonly, have no recall of anything from the last twenty years of your life except, ironically, where you put the keys down – Christie won sixteen awards. She was nominated for a BAFTA and an Oscar, but lost to the crazy French chick who did the Edith Piaf movie and thinks the Americans perpetrated 9/11.
I saw Julie in a Dickens TV adaptation a few years ago, and she resembled a scary, shrunked-up grey prune. Witnessing this trout-hued Julie was like having a bucket of ice poured down my pants. So that would clinch it, surely? I would stop fancying Julie Christie. My love would hereafter be firmly past-tensed. Julie Christie WAS magnificent in the sixties and seventies … and eighties. WAS one of the most breathtaking women in the world. USED TO BE a titanic screen goddess.
I would from now on think of her as Marian in The Go-Between tearing out the heart of young Leo, who discovers the letters he’s been delivering for her (to a ploughman, or some other yokel, who back then was always played by Alan Bates) contain timetables for shagging trysts down in the stables. Ruins the poor kid’s life. Didn’t do much for mine either. Anyway, it was obviously time to farewell the newly elderly Julie for the young, enchanting one from Darling, and Doctor Zhivago and Fahrenheit 451.
I watched her talking to some E! channel suck at the premiere of Away From Her, and she looked a bit saggy and a tad weary – she eschews facelifts – as she earnestly dealt with dumb questions, but … then … she … smiled. She beamed. She was once more the sunburst enchantress of old. So I have to take a rain check, EVEN NOW, on the proposed Julie embargo.
I’m a bit riven by all this. I wouldn’t want to go to bed with someone if there were a chance they might break a hip during coitus. Similarly, if the woman you’re making love to slips off the bed, you don’t want to have the sense from her cries of discomfort that she’s actually had ‘a fall’. This, I imagine, is not a problem I need to worry about, in any case.
You think we must have peaked out now with the mature thing? Not quite. There’s also Joan Collins. I’m quite an admirer of Joan Collins’s film work, particularly in the seventies during her brazen-bad-girl phase. Her accreditation as an actress is still under review, and she would almost certainly have been better at, say, designing aircraft navigation systems, but in seventies films like The Stud she was a gorgeous and smouldering huntress, the original cougar. And since she was a cougar then, what the fuck does that make her now? It makes her seventy-five years old, that’s what it makes her. It makes her quite possibly smell a bit like your nanna used to.
Collins appears now and then on TV, her face comprehensively caked in limestone, dragged upwards and pegged behind her ears, and her eyes lined with charcoal. She looks not unlike Joan Collins, and I like Joan Collins, so I’m a bit stuck as far as breaking free of an attraction that is now clearly quite odd. I’d be fascinated to see Joan’s face first thing, before she enters her space-age ensuite to prepare for the outside world; prior to her punching the Max Factor buttons, switching on the Revlon accelerator and deploying the Estée Lauder shields. Her husband is thirty-two years younger than she is, far younger than me. What does he see in the morning? And could he sell us a photo?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t exclusively have a thing for older women. I have a thing for a select few older women. I am infatuated also with kids like Monica Bellucci, a mere ingénue at forty-two; and Salma Hayek, a recent high-school graduate at a mere forty-one years. Jeri Ryan, who portrayed no-nonsense hot bot Seven Of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, is forty, and probably lives with her parents. (By the way, I defy anyone to nominate another character in film and television history with a name as stupid as Seven Of Nine.)
Earlier this year, I spent a day on the set of a feature film called Kin. The star of the movie was Isabel Lucas, who, apparently, was on Home and Away. I’ve never seen it. More recently, she had a sizeable role in Transformers 2, or Three Transformers And A Baby, or whatever the latest franchise effort is called, playing the spunk who’s not quite as hot as Megan Fox. Stick-insect thin, creaseless, waxen and, most of all, tiny, she’s twenty-three, but seemingly as airbrushed in real life as she is on glossy paper. Perhaps I have to face up to the fact that pretty twenty-three-year-old actresses are only abnormal to me because I don’t hang out with twenty-three year olds.
When I was thirteen, I developed a crush that has endured for decades and trumps all challengers. I fell in love with Anne (or Anne-Louise, if you prefer) Lambert, who played Miranda in Picnic At Hanging Rock. I fell for Anne several years before Picnic, when I looked through a crack in the lounge door to watch Number 96. According to Wikipedia, ‘she played a nymphomaniac’. Wikipedia diarists might want to re-think the use of the word ‘nymphomaniac’, which not only Andrea Dworkin but the rest of us consider to be a bit of a sexist masculine construct. But I’ll have to look at the new Number 96 DVDS. Maybe that’s how she was credited?
Anne Lambert …………………… Nymphomaniac.
She’s never been what you’d call a ubiquitous presence, but these days she very occasionally guests in TV trifles like All Saints, or in independent films. At fifty-five, she is still a rapturous beauty but in the not-too-distant future she will become someone you stand up for on the tram.
I want to meet Anne. I can find out where she lives, and get a ladder and tap on her bedroom window. I’m sure she’d understand. Especially since I will have travelled from Melbourne especially to do it. (She lives somewhere in the bush in New South Wales, so I’m certain I’d only have to ask around.) I’ve seen the dress she wore to the Hanging Rock picnic. It’s on display in Canberra. They keep it in a glass case so people like me won’t hug its hems and cry.
Anyway, off to aversion therapy. They make me watch recent Julie Christie films and whenever she appears I have to eat a fart.
It’s not working.
Michael Witheford is a Melbourne-based writer and hack bass player, whose new band, The TV Set, debuts at the Marquis of Lorne in Fitzroy on Sunday 8th August from 6pm-8pm. He blogs sporadically at ‘Thought Crimes’.
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