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Hollywood used to have a brutal expiration date for actresses: best before age 40.
Leading roles dwindled, romantic parts disappeared and women who’d spent decades honing their craft were expected to fade politely into the background. Even Meryl Streep — considered the greatest actress of her (baby boomer) generation — used to think so.
Then along came the actresses of Generation X.
Born between 1965 and 1980, these women came of age in an analog world, learning early how to solve problems on their own and question the rules handed to them — and became, as Pew Research reports, “savvy, skeptical and self-reliant.”
Now, at roughly ages 45 to 61, Gen X actresses are bringing those qualities to middle age and, in turn, rewriting the rules for women on-screen. When Hollywood didn’t offer the roles they wanted, they created them. Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Viola Davis built production companies and developed their own projects. Others pushed for equal pay, fought stereotypes and demanded greater diversity. They became directors, producers, entrepreneurs and activists — and kept acting.
And forget slowing down. Charlize Theron trained for months to scale rock faces. Halle Berry made her directorial debut in her 50s playing a mixed martial arts fighter. Salma Hayek posed for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit at 58. Jessica Chastain enrolled at Harvard at 48. Nicole Kidman, recipient of the 2022 Movies for Grownups Award for best actress for her role in Being the Ricardos, is training to become an end-of-life doula.
Many of these actresses arrived in Hollywood battling poverty, racism, sexism or the burden of being valued solely for their beauty. Decades later, they’ve done more than survive the Dream Factory. They’re producing, directing, reinventing and pushing their bodies, careers and expectations into new territory. With the list below, AARP’s Movies for Grownups salutes the 25 Most Fabulous Gen X Actresses.
Meet the Stars
1. Viola Davis, 61
Viola Davis had already won a Tony when movie audiences discovered how much power she could pack into eight minutes.
Playing the anguished mother in 2008’s Doubt opposite Meryl Streep, Davis earned her first Oscar nomination — and launched an extraordinary screen career.
The road there was anything but glamorous. One of six children, Davis grew up rummaging through garbage cans for food and living in condemned, rat-infested apartments. “I grew up in abject poverty,” she told AARP. “There was no evidence of greatness in my life. So I had to have magic.… I had to dare to ask the big, big question: ‘What if, Viola? What if there’s something out there for you?’ ”
What those years gave her, she said, was resilience. “I have the ability to survive the hard stuff.”
As a child, she found inspiration watching Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. She discovered her love of acting in high school. Scholarships carried her to Rhode Island College and Juilliard, then to the stage — and eventually to that pivotal scene with Streep.
“Our task as artists is to lean into the truth as much as you can stand, without judgment,” she said of the complex women she has portrayed.
After Doubt came a best actress Oscar nomination for The Help, followed by television history: In 2015, as formidable law professor Annalise Keating on How to Get Away With Murder, Davis became the first Black woman to win the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series. Then came Fences. Reprising the role that had already garnered her a Tony, Davis won the 2017 best supporting actress Oscar, becoming the first Black performer to achieve acting’s Triple Crown (Oscar, Emmy and Tony) — as well as the Movies for Grownups best supporting actress award.
“They are in my office,” she said of her awards. “I’m very proud of it.” She thinks often of her younger self: “Sometimes I want to reach out and go, ‘Do you know what’s coming? Hold tight!’ ”
Davis later broadened her impact behind the camera with JuVee Productions, which she founded with husband Julius Tennon — the couple share a teenage daughter, Genesis — producing projects including The Woman King.
Her candid 2022 memoir, Finding Me, became a bestseller. Its audiobook won a Grammy in 2023, completing her EGOT. “When you write about your trauma, you have to process,” she said. “That’s the hardest part.”
Having reckoned with the past, Davis is looking forward. Next up is the newly announced thriller Ascent, in which she’ll produce and star as a corporate fixer — “sort of James Bond meets Network.”
And just like when she was a kid, she’s open to the magic of possibility.
“I’m curious to see, OK, Viola, what’s going to come from that?” she said. “What beautiful surprises?”
2. Charlize Theron, 51
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
Charlize Theron used to get turned down for film roles because she was too pretty.
So the South African–born former model gained 30 pounds and transformed her face with prosthetics to play real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, nabbing the 2004 Academy Award for best actress.
Turns out, Theron is made of pretty tough stuff. She became one of Hollywood’s most formidable action stars as a fearless warrior in Mad Max: Fury Road — and landed on AARP’s list of the 12 Greatest Female Movie Action Heroes. Prepping for her role as a rock climber for this year’s Apex, Theron endured months of grueling, hands-on training, including bouldering, top-roping and rappelling. To celebrate the film’s launch, she scaled a billboard in Times Square.
Next up came immortality. Theron plays the nymph-goddess Calypso opposite Matt Damon’s Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Off-screen, Theron is a doting mom to two adopted daughters, Jackson, 14, and August, 11. Since 2008, she’s been a U.N. Messenger of Peace, working to prevent HIV and eliminate violence against women.
These days, “more interesting stories come my way about what we consider real people,” she told W magazine, “than about glamorous, beautiful people.”
3. Halle Berry, 60
Swan Gallet/WWD/Getty Images
She began her career in beauty pageants and went on to make Hollywood history.
In 2000, Halle Berry won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, playing the first Black woman nominated for a best actress Oscar. Two years later, she herself became the first Black woman to win the award, for Monster’s Ball. Nearly 25 years later, she remains the only one.
Drama wasn’t her only superpower. Berry kicked serious on-screen butt in the X-Men franchise and as a Bond girl in Die Another Day.
In her 50s, she added the title of director to her résumé with Bruised, putting herself through punishing MMA training to play a battered fighter trying to make a comeback.
“I also wanted to do the sport justice,” Berry told AARP. “I had to look formidable.”
Last year, Berry relaunched her fitness and wellness brand, Respin, into a menopause and women’s health company after suffering through her own perimenopause nightmare.
“I was one of the millions of women who spent 4-5 years of their lives being misdiagnosed, or not diagnosed at all,” she says on her website, calling her advocacy for women “my greatest act.”
The actress portrays a middle-aged insurance broker in this year’s crime thriller Crime 101 — a character who shares Berry’s determination not to diminish with age.
“Women are told that when we reach a certain number, we’re no longer valuable. I believe the opposite,” she told AARP. “Society should look at us as jewels as we get older. Because the older women get, the more formidable we are.”
Indeed. On her recent birthday, Berry posted on Instagram, “60, here I come.”
4. Penélope Cruz, 52
Gilbert Flores/Variety/Getty Images
Playing a liberated sex therapist in The Invite, Spanish-born Penélope Cruz earned raves from critics — and cheers from Gen X women — for a scene about perimenopause that she herself pushed to add. “I felt like, if we really want her to be a good therapist and sexologist,” Cruz told Net-a-Porter, “she’s going to understand about female hormones.”
A recurring muse of Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar — the two have made seven feature films together, including All About My Mother — Cruz made history as the first Spanish actress nominated for a best actress Oscar, for Almodóvar’s Volver.
Two years later, her smoldering performance in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona made her the first Spanish woman to win an Academy Award (for best supporting actress).
As she enters her 50s, she’s slated for an upcoming Nancy Meyers comedy. “The level of diversity in the women that I have been offered to play has maintained, maybe gotten even greater,” she told Net-a-Porter.
Off-screen, Cruz married fellow Spanish Oscar winner Javier Bardem, 57, in 2010, nearly two decades after they met filming Jamón Jamón, and they have two children.
“I feel like I’m still learning,” she told People, regarding their relationship. “Is there a day where you really get to know yourself? No. So the same with your partner.”
5. Drew Barrymore, 51
Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Sipa USA/AP Images
Born into Hollywood royalty — the legendary Barrymore acting family — Drew Barrymore entranced us as adorable little Gertie in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. After a famously troubled childhood and youth, the actress pulled off one of Hollywood’s greatest second acts, turning around her life and career to become a highly bankable and beloved romantic-comedy star with The Wedding Singer, Ever After and Never Been Kissed.
“I’m so sick of the guilt and sadness,” she told AARP, regarding her past. “It’s the greatest habit I will ever break in my life.”
A dramatic turn as eccentric “Little Edie” Beale in Grey Gardens earned her critical respect and a 2010 Golden Globe Award for best actress.
Today, her biggest reinventions are as a joyous daytime TV host on the feel-good The Drew Barrymore Show, renewed through 2028 for a seventh and eighth season, and as a mom. She shares daughters Olive, 13, and Frankie, 12, with ex-husband Will Kopelman.
“They’re literally worth everything, and I’m going to love them and be inspired by them,” she told AARP.
Little Gertie has no trouble getting older: “I have no issues with aging,” she said. “This is the happiest I’ve been in my life.”
6. Jessica Chastain, 49
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
Flame-haired beauty Jessica Chastain hit Hollywood like an overnight cyclone, appearing in seven films in 2011, including The Tree of Life, Take Shelter and The Help, which earned her first Oscar nomination. Her second came a year later for her steely turn as the CIA analyst hunting Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty.
As her star rose, Chastain fought loudly for pay equality, including for The Help costar Octavia Spencer. “Your silence is your discrimination,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “So if you are succeeding in an environment where there is discrimination, you are actively being discriminatory.”
Her crowning achievement arrived after she spent nearly a decade developing The Eyes of Tammy Faye, in which she starred. Chastain’s uncanny transformation into televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker won her the Academy Award for best actress in 2022.
This fall, Chastain stars in the supernatural horror film Other Mommy, playing a mother and her sinister double. You can also find her on campus. Last year, the self-confessed “secret nerd” enrolled in a two-year master of public administration program at Harvard’s Kennedy School to study economics and quantitative theory and earn “the sexiest degree ever.”
“My goal,” she joked to Jimmy Kimmel, “is to take over the world.”
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