Quotes About Ageism

Men are boys for such a long time and really don't start getting the great roles until they're in their mid-thirties. But then they've got a long time to do them, whereas for women, it's all about playing younger and younger and younger.

Hollywood will accept actresses playing ten years older, but actors can play ten years younger.

There's an appetite for vigour in films. The camera loves a bit of movement. Movement is usually attached to younger people and men, and that's just the way it is. I think that it's a bitter pill to swallow, but it's a fact that there aren't going to be masses and masses of roles for older women because there isn't the audience for it.

Most good roles are written for young men. We are fixated on youth. So however much people say there is nothing wrong with being bald, the reality is once the hair is gone, you might not get the parts.

In the music world, ageism is a big issue. It's about youth and youth culture. There's no other art form that I know that requires you to be a certain age.

When my first grey hairs appeared in my 30s, a senior BBC producer quietly took me aside and told me to cover them up. It was the first time I realised being youthful was a job requirement - looking older was not allowed.

Don't trust anyone over 30.

Soaps are one of the few areas on TV that really embrace older women. In drama, there's this ridiculous invisibility for women between the ages of 40 and 60. Unless you're old enough to play a grandmother, there just aren't the roles.

I don't like that politics is associated with middle-aged, greying men.

I remember auditioning for something where the woman was supposed to be 42, and I was 33 or something, and they were like, 'No women over 35 can audition.' That was in the breakdown. I don't think they would do that anymore - I would like to hope that they wouldn't put that in writing - but it's mind-boggling.

It's incredibly unfair. You don't see a lot of 60-year-old women with 20-year-old men onscreen.

The elderly are treated not as a priority but as a nuisance.

I'm not in the movie business anymore, and hardly any 70 year olds are. I always ask the producers: 'Are there no 70-year old vampires?' Apparently there are not - or even zombies for that matter. I guess they all get eaten.

When I got signed, I had just turned 16. I felt like I had to continuously have these confrontations with older men who were doubting my ideas because I was a woman, because I was 16.

Never let them see you in public after you've turned thirty-five. You're finished if you do!

As I plotted 'Blueprints,' I realized that ageism against women is most obvious in the field of entertainment - and that I needed a TV show in my book.

I remember when I was at Radio 1 I would get these Tweets saying 'Shut up! You're so old!' I was 36!

You see these casting directors' lists of characters, and they're all boxed in. Twenties is the hot girlfriend, thirties you can still be hot but moving swiftly to hot mum. Forties, you're the legal person in a pantsuit. Then, once you reach your fifties, you're positively elderly.

Hiding inside this well-meaning phrase is a deep cultural assumption that old is bad and young is good.

and the hot topic: age.

America had been taught that beauty only resided in youth, especially in the female.

It really pisses me off when people look at women who are older and are not in a relationship as somehow sad or missing something, because they certainly don't look at men that way.

I'm carded for R-rated movies. And I get talked down to a lot. When I try to go rent a car or buy an airplane ticket or other stuff adults do, I get 'Okaaaaaay, honey.' I remember when I was 18, getting crayons in a restaurant.

There was an obvious display of blatant sexism when I couldn't get signed. They didn't say I was ugly. They didn't say that they didn't like the music. They said I was too old! At 26! So Badly Drawn Boy, Doves, Elbow, James Blunt - you can be a gnarly old beardy bloke with a bit of a paunch and that's all right?