Kristin Scott Thomas is worried about growing old in an industry that prizes youth, said Sheryl Garratt in The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.). “When you’re my age,” says the 53-year-old actress, “you’re invariably in a supporting role, so there’s often a young woman in her 20s or early 30s who is the lead, and you’re constantly put next to them. You’re watching yourself get old, on a screen that hides nothing.” This is why, she thinks, so many of her peers have undergone plastic surgery. “At the Cannes film festival I got such a shock. I saw lots of my contemporaries there this year, all looking so beautiful and gorgeous and healthy, and I just felt like an old ragbag next to them.” But it’s not just the movie business that’s tough on middle-aged women. The English Patient star says she also feels increasingly invisible in everyday life. “I’m not talking about in a private setting, at a dinner party or anything. But when you’re walking down the street, you get bumped into, people slam doors in your face-—they just don’t notice you. Somehow, you just vanish. It’s a cliché, but men grow in gravitas as they get older, while women just disappear.”
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