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(From left) Burt Reynolds, Angela Bassett, Demi Moore and Jackie Chan were in their 60s for some of the biggest movies of their careers.
Sam Island (Getty Images, 4)
The movies have always been obsessed with youth. But as we get older, we realize it’s the faces with lines that reveal real character on the silver screen. Which is why we’re taking this opportunity to celebrate a group of actors who delivered some of their finest work after they received their AARP cards in the mail.
We recently shined a spotlight on stars who gave indelible performances in their 50s. Now we’re going a bit further down the road and taking a look at some of the best on-screen turns from actors in their 60s. They include thousand-watt Tinseltown icons from yesteryear, stunning comebacks, underappreciated masterpieces, films that took an actor to a new level of excellence, and movies that have something to say about what it means to get older. So without further ado, we present our rundown of 25 great performances from stars in their 60s.
1. Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread (2017)
The dashing Daniel Day-Lewis was 60 when Phantom Thread was released in 2017, and he quit making movies after that, but he made sure to leave us with one final master class. This slow-burning psychological thriller follows a British fashion designer in the 1950s who’s obsessed with his handmade creations but has little patience for other people. Let’s hope the three-time Oscar winner, now 68, reconsiders retirement, though we can take comfort in his unparalleled run of brilliant turns, especially in his AARP years. Day-Lewis’ spectacular performance in Phantom Thread earned him a best-actor nomination in AARP’s annual Movies for Grownups Awards, the most popular show on PBS’ Great Performances.
Fighting Ageism in Hollywood
AARP fights ageism in Hollywood by encouraging the entertainment industry to tap into the unique perspectives and talents that actors, writers and producers who are 50+ bring to their work. AARP’s annual Movies for Grownups Awards, telecast on PBS, celebrates the achievements of the 50-plus community in film and television. This year’s honorees included best actress Oscar winner Demi Moore (The Substance) and best actor Oscar winner Adrien Brody (The Brutalist).
2. Jodie Foster in Nyad (2023)
It feels like we’ve all grown up with Jodie Foster, 62, watching as she evolved from a precocious child actor in the 1970s into a two-time Oscar-winning chameleon. One of her most mature roles is in this inspirational sports drama about controversial long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (played by 2019 AARP Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Award winner Annette Bening, then 65). Foster, then 60, gives a stunning supporting turn as the swimmer’s best friend and coach, a woman patient enough to put up with Nyad’s prickly personality and draw out her more human side. It’s an exquisitely nuanced conjuring act that gives Nyad its beating heart — and won Foster the best-supporting-actress honor at the AARP Movies for Grownups Awards.
3. Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men (2007)
Fourteen years after he snagged a well-deserved best-supporting-actor Oscar for his dogged pursuit of Harrison Ford in 1993’s The Fugitive, Tommy Lee Jones, 78, a five-time AARP Movies for Grownups Award nominee (read his 2012 cover story in AARP The Magazine), delivered his most quietly devastating performance in the Coen brothers’ almost existential adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s modern Western about a grizzled Lone Star State sheriff on the trail of a sagebrush psycho killer (Javier Bardem, now 56). At 61, Jones made us feel the absolute futility of high-minded ideas like law, order and morality when it comes to staring pure evil in the face. It’s a timeless portrait of a world-weary man grasping to make sense of his times.
Burt Reynolds was 61 when he brought heart and humanity to his character in “Boogie Nights.”
Sam Island (Getty Images)
4. Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights (1997)
After a long and cold streak at the box office, Burt Reynolds, at 61, gave the comeback performance of the ’90s with Boogie Nights, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s dizzying epic about the rise and fall of the porn industry in California’s swinging San Fernando Valley at the dawn of the VHS era. As Jack Horner, the producer, director and unlikely father figure of a ragtag group of runaways, studs and starlets, Reynolds, now 82, brings heart and humanity to a story that could have easily detoured into cartoonish condescension. A dazzling and emotionally naked late-career triumph from one of Hollywood’s most underrated legends.
5. Helen Mirren in The Queen (2006)
If you’re going to do a prestige drama about someone as chilly and inscrutable as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, it helps to have an actor like Helen Mirren, 80, who can give the audience subtle hints of the flesh-and-blood human beneath the crown. At 61, Mirren performed a sort of cinematic magic trick as the royal mother, showing us flickers of the inner turmoil of a leader attempting to juggle public stoicism and private vulnerability in the wake of Princess Diana’s tragic death. This is one of those rare, revelatory performances that grows deeper and deeper with each viewing. No wonder this three-time cover subject of AARP The Magazine won best actress in the AARP Movies for Grownups Awards — one of her 16 MFG nominations and three wins, including Career Achievement in 2018.
6. John Wayne in True Grit (1969)
If you grew up watching classic Westerns, it felt like John Wayne was in his 60s forever. He was actually 61 when he filmed True Grit, the greatest of his dusty-saddle epics from the back half of his career. As Rooster Cogburn, a crotchety, eye-patch-wearing U.S. marshal, Wayne sets out with a young girl to find the outlaw who murdered her father. This is a rip-roaring revenge picture that showcases the Duke at his most grizzled and snakebitten. Wayne would end up winning his one and only acting Oscar for this must-see adventure.
At 61, former Brat Packer Demi Moore starred in “The Substance,” one of the creepiest movies of the past decade.
Sam Island (Getty Images)
7. Demi Moore in The Substance (2024)
Is it strange to have an actress who doesn’t look a day past 40 star in a mind-bending thriller about the grotesque extremes one TV personality will endure to turn back the tide of aging? Not when the resulting performance is as assured and hypnotic as 62-year-old Demi Moore’s. At 61, the former Brat Packer delivered the kind of towering turn that made even longtime fans rethink her stature as an artist. This is committed, fearless acting of the highest order in one of the creepiest movies of the past decade. When Moore won best actress at the AARP Movies for Grownups Awards, she said, “If you had told me in my 20s that my 60s would be the best moments of my life, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
8. Ricardo Montalbán in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Ricardo Montalbán was always more than the glad-handing host of Fantasy Island. He was a first-rate actor with silk-smooth charisma and undeniable gravitas. Fifteen years after appearing as the villainous Khan Noonien Singh on a first-season episode of the original Star Trek television series, the then 61-year-old Mexican actor returned to the role for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. All of those years only ended up adding layers of fury, jealousy and white-hot rage to his long-simmering vendetta against William Shatner’s Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise. This is easily the greatest Star Trek movie ever made, thanks in no small part to the wrathful Montalbán (and his ripped pecs).
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