Unreferenced age gaps in on-screen relationships

A lot of the comments on imDB refer to the big age gap of Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper in Love in The Afternoon. None of the characters in Music and Lyrics mention that Alex Fletcher was supposedly in his early twenties when Sophie was six years old. And in Another Cinderella Story, Selena Gomez is seventeen and her love interest is played by Drew Seeley, who is ten years older.

Do actors who are too old or young for their roles distract you from the film? Or are you willing to suspend disbelief?

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I think if the film dwells on the age difference or draws attention to it. Then it's not going to work.

I saw "The Little Bride" from South Korea a couple of nights ago. And this same question occurred to me. Because of a grandfather's dying wish from an old friend, His children consent to an arranged marriage for his granddaughter. She's only 15, and they force her to marry a 22 year old. This age difference definitely piqued my interest: how are they going to handle this elephant in the room? But the film ultimately gets away with it by being a rom-com.

In Eastwood's "Bloodwork" there was a brief sex scene, His love interest was 42 but looked a lot younger, Eastwood was 72 and looked it, and all I could say was yuck!

Michael Caine was 69 in "The Quiet American" and his love interest was still in her 20's, but the film got away with it, since there were no love scenes.

Older men and younger women are is established convention; unless they are really pushing the envelop. So for the most part, I'm willing to suspend disbelief in the fictional world of movies, since in the real world, 21 year old women are seldom attracted to balding middle aged men with spare tires.

It's interesting that you mentioned "Music and Lyrics", because the screenwriters have obviously done the math. When they film was shot, Drew was 32 and Hugh Grant was 47. So their screen characters would have been 6, and 21.

As to whether actors are too old or too young for certain roles?

I remember in "The Jackal" there's a scene where Sidney Poitier runs to save the first lady ... in slow motion. This was done to disguise the fact he was 70 years old at the time. Move magic can really help.

People still flock to Sylvester Stallone action flicks and he's what? 65 years old?

In the film "Me and Orson Welles" the casting was really off. Orson Welles was played by a 30 year old. Whereas he was in real life the actually age of the Zac Elfron character.

I am not so sure about that I can name 3 friends who hsb has left them for woman half their age My X who is 61yr old, his girlfriend is 26yrs My best friends hsb is with a girl who is younger than 3 of their children

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I don't know those movies. But do you mean the characters have a big age difference or the actors playing them have an age difference? Actors often play ages wildly different from their own. As for the old man/young woman thing, people probably won't like this answer but it is linked to sexism.

I mean when the ages of the actors are very different and this is not referred to at all in the film.

It depends on the actor. Cooper looked real old in Love in the Afternoon. But Cary Grant, just a few years younger, was fine with Hepburn in Charades. Grant also had the script written so she was chasing him so he didn't look like a lecher going after a young girl. And of course it is always young girl, old guy that isn't mentioned sometimes. The other way around, unless it is just a few years, they make a big deal about it.

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The first time I noticed it was reading a Cracked Magazine comic making fun of the cast of Beverly Hills 90210, when I was a kid. Ever since then I usually notice it but in some cases I'm willing to be pretty forgiving. For one thing actors like Molly Ringwald and Kate Winslet are pretty rare so I understand if it's usually easier to find someone with both talent and experience -- say, in their mid 20s -- to play a teenager. It might be better for really young people not to rush into show business in general, anyway. It can be really laughable in some cases though, for example Luke Perry playing a seventeen year old on tv when he was in his mid twenties (and looked like he was in his mid 30s at the youngest!). It also didn't help that he was a lousy actor. There's a good bit in the first Scary Movie where one of the teenage characters says "If this was a movie we'd all be played by people in their late 20s, early 30s!" leading to a moment of awkward silence.

It happens with older characters too, though. Cary Grant in North by Northwest and Harrison Ford in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull both looked old and haggard in the middle of their action scenes. On the other hand, if the actors seem like their having fun I think being aware of their age can add to the excitement. Yuen Siu Tien was in his late sixties when he played the drunken master in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (directed by his son). They don't specify the character's age but watching him do some great physical comedy and martial arts scenes is made even more enjoyable when you're aware of the character's age.

But what about when it is a romantic film? Can you have a leading man/leading lady who is too old for their partner and get away with it?

Harold and Maude obviously did, but the age difference was addressed in the film, at least by characters other than Harold and Maude. As a rule, it never has bothered me in the slightest. As they say, love is blind.

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Harold and Maude really wasn't a romantic film. It was a black comedy. If it was a realistic movie about a young man with an old lady we would have been grossed out.

I disagree 100%. Just because a film is a black comedy doesn't mean it can't be romantic. Harold and Maude is incredibly, lyrically romantic.

Making the film a comedy does help soften the blow, as it were. Then you can choose how much you believe in the relationship.

There's a thirty-year age gap between Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in Funny Face but that didn't bother me as much because their relationship was not overtly sexual. It was sort of Disney princess level (although saying that, Esmerelda and Phoebus's attraction was relatively sexual).

Funny Face and Love in the Afternoon are comedies too, so what's up?

The ultimate film examining age relations is probably Benjamin Button in that it takes the idea to its logical limit. Although it's main thesis might be how the dual bookends of our lives resemble each other, I think it does succeed in making a deeper point about age as a superficial, physical marker, not an essential one to ones character or that which is ultimately loved---the who not the what. The same point is touched on in Harold and Maude, but in that case it was probably just dismissed as a forced transgression due to its comic presentation.

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Yes it was, and no, I wasn't grossed out by the clearly romantic swing of the film.

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Funny Face is a musical comedy but the romance is still at the centre.

The discussion's not really about films where it's about the age gap (such as Harold and Maude), but where there is an age gap which is unacknowledged, normally because the leading man is trying to knock a few decades off his age

age honestly shouldnt even matter

A little off-topic, but interesting fact anyway;

In The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury played Laurence Harvey's mother and she was only 3 years older than him!

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Nice one, didn't even know that. Similarly, Kate Mara played Heath Ledger's daughter in Brokeback Mountain even though he was only 4 years older than her.

Angelia Jolie played Colin Farrell's mother in Alexander, despite the fact that she was only a year older than him. And Eileen Herlie played Gertrude to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet- despite the fact that she was 11 years younger than him!

I think unreferenced age gaps like the above are used to suggest an Oedipus complex.