Age Spots and Spotlights: Celebrity, Ageing and Performance
Diane Keaton has just published her memoirs, reflecting on becoming a mother at 50 and kiss...
Symposium on celebrity and ageing looks at careers of Keaton, Bardot & Taylor
Diane Keaton has just published her memoirs, reflecting on becoming a mother at 50 and kissing Jack Nicholson at 57. Keaton, like many other Hollywood stars, is ageing in her own unique way.
On Friday 9 December Birkbeck, University of London held a major research symposium exploring how stars including Keaton, Brigitte Bardot, Nicole Kidman and Elizabeth Taylor aged in the public eye.
‘Age Spots and Spotlights: Celebrity, Ageing and Performance’ featured a range of leading film and media scholars presenting papers on subjects as diverse as ageing celebrity war reporters, and celebrity gossip bloggers like Perez Hilton who endlessly scrutinise how well (or not) contemporary women stars are ageing. Co-organisers, Dr. Deborah Jermyn (Roehampton University) and Dr. Janet McCabe (Birkbeck, University of London) believe the time is right for new scholarship focussing on ageing and celebrity and for us to think anew about how we think about growing old.
“We hear endless reports of how age is becoming increasingly relative; ‘60 is the new 40’ and so on. With the baby boomer generation going into retirement and being reluctant to be written off as ‘old’, there is a heightened demand for positive representations of ageing. At the same time, stars like Helen Mirren are re-writing the rules for older women working in Hollywood”, says Jermyn. The symposium addressed some of these issues and asked just how much things are really changing, since women stars are still subjected to a much more critical eye as they age than their male co-stars.
“Growing old, and I do mean growing,” writes Diane Keaton, “requires reinvention”. “I like this quote”, says McCabe. “We must adjust our ideas about how we age without talking exclusively about how we defy the ageing process. This symposium adopted different perspectives and thought anew about how celebrity is changing our perceptions and attitudes toward ageing and getting older.”
Dr Janet McCabe and Dr Deborah Jermyn, have written a piece for the Guardian's Comment is Free section on the topic of celebrity and ageing.
Event details:
Age Spots and Spotlights: Celebrity, Ageing and Performance
Venue: Clore Theatre, Birkbeck, University of London, 2 Malet St WC1E 7HX
Date: Friday 9 December
Time: 9.30 – 5.00
More details are available on the website www.agespotsandspotlights.blogspot.com/