They’ve had children and it’s not about bouncing around in the sack and proving their sexuality, but suddenly they’re alone and the question is glaring: will they ever have sex again? I hope it helped them.”
They’re typically past their sexual prime. It allowed them to be a bit randy and bawdy.”Īs such, it fed into her own mission to speak out for “an entire population of women in their 50s who are dumped. It was a little bit of an awakening for women of my own age. “I like what it was doing for women who were thinking about their sexuality. Tongue-in-cheek though she is about Fifty Shades – “everyone is, including EL James” – she defends its message. “No! I have children so I don’t want to be on top because I’d be travelling all the time, in the gym 24/7, constantly having facial work. Although she has worked on prestigious films by such directors as the Coens, Clint Eastwood (Space Cowboys and Mystic River) and Sean Penn (Into the Wild), she says: “I’ve never been at the ‘top top’, where we’re talking millions of dollars and people screaming at you in the street.” (It’s what Alexandra Del Lago describes in Sweet Bird as “the top of the beanstalk, the country of the flesh-hungry, blood-thirsty ogre”.) She accepted the role because she was curious about being part of an “event” movie. “I ended up getting in a wee bit of trouble for it because they didn’t want to play up the sexual nature – but come on guys, it’s a love story with handcuffs.”
She was amused when her tweets were “shut down” by the studio.
Harden carried the persona into her personal Twitter stream, where she cracked jokes about mistaking a nipple clamp for a brooch and thanked her son for leaving a bracelet under the Christmas tree (the accompanying picture showed a string of anal beads).
Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar She carried her Fifty Shades persona over to Twitter, cracking jokes about mistaking a nipple clamp for a broochĭr Grace Trevelyan Grey is an elegant paediatrician who is the only person unafraid of the squillionaire sadist at the centre of EL James’s novel and the movie franchise. Tempestuous … Harden with Ed Harris in Pollock, for which she won the best supporting actress Oscar.
Most recently, she reaffirmed that strength in the CBS hospital series Code Black, in which she saves life and limb as gung-ho hero Leanne Rorish, and in the Fifty Shades of Grey films, where she makes fleeting appearances as Christian Grey’s adoptive mother. Strong women have been a feature of Harden’s career, from the comically steadfast fiancee of Robin Williams’ scatty professor in the sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997) to the tempestuous Lee Krasner, wife of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock, a role that won her a best supporting actress Oscar in 2001 for the biopic Pollock. In Sweet Bird or Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf, they created powerful parts for women, but “I was thinking: in order to be a strong woman, did you have to be a monster at that time?” The trap, she believes, is to play Del Lago as an out-and-out monster, though she often appears to be one, and she comes from a line of mid-20th century monsters created for the stage by writers such as Williams and Edward Albee. The greatest tragedy of humanity is our awareness of our own mortality, and ageing is the clock ticking.” She cites Del Lago’s lament: “I’ve been accused of having a death wish, but I think it’s life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.” I believe what he’s actually writing about is loss, and that’s a more profound thing to play. “There is an inevitability in ageing and to think one is going to bypass the effects is immature and shallow. While conceding that “the issue is of course still pertinent: in Hollywood, where are the roles for older women?”, Harden is adamant that the play has to be more than a whinge about wrinkles and thinning hair. “If you think about old Hollywood, Del Lago would have been doing her leading roles during her 20s and 30s and probably would have felt washed up in her late 40s,” she muses. Harden is 57 and performing, in Jonathan Kent’s Chichester festival theatre production, opposite her 35-year-old compatriot Brian J Smith. In the 1959 premiere, directed in New York by Elia Kazan, Del Lago was played by Geraldine Page, who was not yet 40 (and only a year older than Paul Newman, who partnered her as the much younger Chance).
‘In Hollywood, where are the roles for older women?’ … Marcia Gay Harden Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian