Seniors ‘an endangered species’ in Hollywood

It’s no surprise that Hollywood worships youth and that, as actresses in particular get older, their careers can come to a premature end.

That’s not simply bad news for the job prospects of aspiring Meryl Streeps or Ruby Dees of the world. As a new report from the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative scholars Stacy Smith, Katherine Pieper and Marc Choueiti suggests, “seniors on screen are an endangered species in cinematic storytelling.”

There are a few older characters who make it to the big screen, of course. Eleven per cent of the 4,066 characters who had lines in the 100 top-grossing movies of 2015 were 60 or older. That might not sound like a lot relative to the actual U.S. population, but Smith and her colleagues argued that it “was a good year for seniors in ensemble films” — one where movies such as “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” boosted overall totals.

Who are these fictional seniors, and how do they spend their time?

72.8 per cent of the characters were male, and 82.1 per cent of them were white. They were overwhelmingly heterosexual. 61.6 per cent of them had jobs, though older men were more likely to be depicted as working than women. White male characters were more likely to have prestigious jobs and women were generally shut out of the top ranks of fields such as law, journalism, politics and science.

Very few of these older characters, just 10.5 per cent, were depicted as having health issues.

And 52.6 per cent of the movies that featured senior characters also included comments that the researchers interpreted as ageist. Many of those comments were spoken by other characters to older people, but in a number of movies, older characters made self-deprecating or diminishing comments about their own age.

There are clear gaps between the way Hollywood sees older people and the way they see themselves. Humana, the health and wellness company, surveyed 2,000 people 60 and older about whether they felt they were depicted accurately in movies and, explained Dr. Yolangel Hernandez Suarez, “the answer was a resounding no. They thought themselves to be more healthy in mind and body, more connected, and more savvy than they were portrayed in film.”