Women in movies: I can't forget these silver-haired ladies on the silver screen

I refused to Google it. I bought a book years ago, "Flip Dictionary," that was enormously helpful because I could reverse engineer the names and titles for objects I could absolutely not remember or never knew. But that was in the years before Google made us all know-it-all fools.

Instead it became a challenge for me to see how long it would take me — it was three days — to naturally recall the word for the beneath the skin infection. No, not acne or pimple, but that word that was lost to me, the one that disappeared like the earring I lost on the dance floor.

It came back to me: Cyst.

I’m 62 years old, described as older (or just old) and I forget things now and then. Thankfully, nothing of what I am experiencing as an older woman is catastrophic, but you would maybe not know that, the way older women are either partially erased or used as punch lines in many corners of our culture. Thankfully, there are a couple of current exceptions.

Michelle Pfeiffer — my age — is starring in “French Exit,” a story about a woman whose “plan was to die before the money ran out.” That didn’t happen.

Also featured on screens now is the HBO Max movie, “Let Them All Talk,” starring Meryl Streep (71), Dianne Wiest (72) and Candice Bergen (74), as characters who are ... friends of a certain age. Grinning as part of this septuagenarian trio, Streep said that most often older women in movies are “witches, grotesques, gargoyles or sweet little grandmothers."

That is true. But there is another reality that has been hiding in plain sight: the glorious older women who have been there all along on the small — and big — screen, parading as a chorus line of magnificent elder goddesses for the past 60 years.

Glory days of women on television

It is impossible to forget Cicely Tyson in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” who was a force playing a character more than a century old. Angela Lansbury could solve every mystery there ever was without losing her temper on “Murder, She Wrote,” and Lucille Ball was a treasure. I adored her, appreciating her fictional friend Ethel as much as she did.

“The Jeffersons” was a double header delight with Isabel Sanford as George Jefferson’s much smarter wife, Louise; Marla Gibbs was on hand for the best retorts. I loved the opening music, the outfits and the fact that Isabel got top billing in the credits. I noticed.

“The Golden Girls,” yes, yes, and “Maude.” Castaway Lovey Howell in “Gilligan’s Island” was way smarter than her dreadful, boorish husband. I wanted her to be rescued and leave him behind.

Agnes Moorehead on “Bewitched,” was immensely powerful with none of that odd nose twitching; her magic was ordained with a swooping grand gesture. Eartha Kitt was purring on all the variety shows and even in “Batman;” I wanted to be sexy like her when it was my time. Barbara Stanwyck on “The Big Valley” held four children plus the whole ranch together as a single mom.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s relishing these older sisters, mothers, aunties, grandmothers, not thinking they were less than because they were older, but, in fact, more than I was. They were capable and held their own.

The older women on the big screen were also worth learning from and longing to be. Of course, they were not as plentiful as the old men because this is assuredly a country for old men.

Numbers don't lie

"Frail, Frumpy and Forgotten: A Report on the Movie Roles of Women of Age,” a new study from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, analyzes how women over 50 were depicted in 32 top-grossing films from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany in 2019. It’s not pretty.

None of the leads are women. Only 25.3% of the characters over 50 are played by women. Nearly half, or 46.8%, of the films depicted women in that age race as conforming to "ageist stereotypes" like senile, homebound, feeble or frumpy. “Older male characters outnumber older female characters 2-to-1,” the report states.

This is even as older women outnumber older men in real life. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2016 there were 27.5 million women over 65 years old, compared to 21.8 million men in that same age group.

I never knew my paternal grandmother; she died in the 1950s before I was born. My mother’s mother died when I was just out of college in 1980, and my own mother passed 18 years ago. I regret I do not have older female relatives in my daily life or inner family circle, though I have a cadre of women friends older than me whom I cherish.

It is all the more urgent then for me to remember the ladies who are there as screen role models, to offer not only their talents but a vision of what I could become.

Angela Bassett in “Black Panther” ruled the world. Alfre Woodard in “Juanita” looks better at 68 than I did at 28. These dames are not Granny of “The Beverly Hillbillies” or the “Grey Gardens” freaks, but the iridescent Cher, Helen Mirren, Debbie Allen, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Gloria Estefan, Lily Tomlin, Diane Keaton, plus a constellation of stars who are not age-defying, but age-embracing in their daring and shine.

Yes, the older women on screens are fewer in number, but they each serve as lifelong guides for me, as I only aim to be a smidge as graceful, powerful and influential as these women were — and are.

In her 2019 book, "Elderhood," Louise Aronson writes:

My dream of old age looks like this: A competent, attractive, powerful woman with wild hair, vibrant eyes and a love of life — and herself.

Even as my own aging results in some words and memories temporarily eluding me, I vow to not forget these magnificent dames who embody the hope for what being older can be.

Michele Weldon is an author, journalist, emerita faculty at Northwestern University and senior leader with The OpEd Project. Her latest book is "Act Like You’re Having A Good Time."

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Movies: Classic Hollywood wasn't afraid of older ladies on the screen