Shootouts and fist-fights are no longer a young man’s game. Hollywood is rebranding ageing actors as action heroes – but it still discards older women

Male careers in the movies have always been longer than female ones, but until recently there was only one real route to on-screen immortality – to the certified, gold-standard agelessness of, say, Cary Grant. (In North By Northwest, Grant, then 55, not only appeared opposite a woman 20 years younger than him, Eva Marie Saint, his screen mother was played by someone only seven years his senior.) The key principle is suavity: the refusal to break a sweat; sophistication with the faintest hint of self‑mockery; the actor letting us know that he is old enough to know how silly this all is.

There are still disciples following that path up the mountain to the sunny uplands of longevity – perhaps we should think of this as Mount Rushmore being reconfigured to include a huge stone likeness of Grant himself, like the ones he scrambled over so urbanely in North By Northwest. Over there, do you see? There are George Clooney and Hugh Grant (both 54) in their hiking shorts, clambering for dear life as the career shadows fall, and a little further down is Colin Firth (also 54), trying to make sense of the map. Richard Gere (65) is sitting cross-legged on a boulder and seems to be meditating, though he may just be taking a nap. Suddenly they all freeze (though with Gere it is hard to tell). What’s that sound? Gunfire. But it seems to be coming from further up the mountain, where the old-timers are plainly not putting their feet up.

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