Facing the Mid-Life Female Conundrum

Juliet Stevenson is one of Britain’s most popular and prolific actors, starring in films, television productions and on the stage. One of her best-known films was “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a motion picture that helped to define the baby boomer generation in the same way as “The Big Chill.” On the debut of her latest film, the romantic comedy “A Previous Engagement,” she spoke from England with BoomerCafé publisher David Henderson about her work, life, balancing career with raising two children and challenges at this point in her middle-aged life.

[Listen to the interview with Juliet Stevenson online - click here]

David: Juliet, how are you handling middle-age? You are phenomenally talented. I’ve noticed that you are very busy and have done something like 20 films in the last eight years. How do you do it?

Juliet: Have I? I haven’t counted. Yes, I have worked a lot. I spend my whole life juggling … my children and my work and my partner, Hugh (Brody), and other things besides. I just consider myself like anybody else who is doing that … and most women I know are doing that. I think it is kind of crazy and there are times when I think that I’ve bitten off a little more than I can chew.

I wouldn’t have it otherwise, and I haven’t noticed any drop-off of stamina much. I haven’t yet experienced a lot of energy loss. People say it happens to you in your 40s but I don’t really feel that … yet. I guess it’s easy if you have natural stamina. I think it’s genetic … my Mum is 83, and she’s still tearing around. I don’t tire that easily.

I have had my kids late, and that does make for some degree of exhaustion. My littlest is only seven, and he needs a lot of running around … football in the park, up early and bed late … but I asked for this. These are all choices I made, and I wouldn’t have asked for them if I didn’t think I could somehow manage them. It’s like anything – you derive energy from what you like to do and I love my kids to pieces and I would never have managed sustaining a career without children like this. They just keep me sane.

I think that as you get to middle-age I think that one of the great problems is that you start to see the work you do and the industry you are in with a much more saturnine eye … I’m not in love with the (motion picture) industry or the business anymore, and that’s for certain. When the work is good, it’s still thrilling. When the script arrives that’s truthful and exciting and original, I love it as much as I ever did but there’s a lot about the profession that I dislike, and I think I would have found it very hard to go on in it if I hadn’t had kids to enable me just to step right out of it and get a perspective on it. So the two different aspects of your life complement each other in a way.

David: Wasn’t it last year … you were cast as Colin Firth’s mother in the film, “And, When Did You Last See Your Father.”  How did that feel?

Juliet:  I know … outrageous wasn’t it?!

David: And, you are about the same age!

Juliet:  I think I’m about three years older than Colin … I know (laughter).  The character … I had to go between mid-30s through late 60 … 70.  I thought, how am I ever going to play 70!  That’s crazy! Well, I had a lot of latex (makeup) … let’s just get that out there …

[Listen to the interview with Juliet Stevenson online - click here]

David: I saw similarities between the character Nina that you played in “Truly, Madly, Deeply” and the character of Julia in your new film, “A Previous Engagement.” Both seem like intense yet vulnerable women.

Juliet: I thought that, too, but I really hadn’t thought about it. When I watched “A Previous Engagement,” I thought, gosh she’s like a … she is an older Nina. I completely agree, and I think that has to do with the writing.

Joan (Carr-Wiggin, who wrote “A Previous Engagement”) writes fantastic dialogue. I thought the dialogue was the best dialogue I’d had in a movie since “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” She just understands the rhythms of speech and how the heart and the head are just furiously fighting for attention when you speak. You delude yourself with language and then you backtrack … sentences are broken up … nobody speaks in perfect sentences and most writers don’t recognize that. But Joan really does understand about the way people think, the fragmentation of thought and the infusion of thought with passion. She just understands the rhythms that connect you up.

And, I think there is something similar in the character Joan had written … very similar to Nina. Both characters are quirky, full of contradictions. Both are very intelligent but also capable of making really daft decisions and not always knowing herself well enough to make a wise decision and yet impulsive on the one hand and cautious on the other … wanting adventure, terrified of adventure. That comes from the writers. It’s amazing how few writers are really able to write dialogue that reflects the complexity of who we really are. As an actor, you get that dialogue in your mouth, it releases you, it gives you scope and you really play it.

David: Tell me about your interest in human rights … to help asylum seekers in England.

Juliet: I recently mounted an event in London … it is to give voice to people seeking asylum in England, mothers and children shut up in detention centers without lawyers or protection. I am very ashamed with what this country has become in the way it deals about the asylum process. It’s cruel, it’s humiliating, it’s degrading and for those who have to experience it and for those whose country it is, at best it’s an embarrassment and at worst an outrage. It’s having a terrible impact on a large number of people. I just can’t stand it that England is like that. It shouldn’t be like that. We have such wealth, so many resources. People are just asking for a fair hearing. We should be a country proud of offering refuge to people in need of it, and I can’t stand it that it is not that anymore, and the government has fallen prey to the tabloid press who are always priding themselves on tough immigration control.

David: Do you have any advice to share with women in their 40s and 50s about relationships, career and the challenges they face at this point in their lives?

Juliet: I suppose I would say of my own experience … I think I function best when I ignore. When I function from a sense of who I am, based on a sense of who I feel myself to be inside, and not try to conform to what the world expects me to be from the outside because of my age. When I am just functioning from instinct and from those internal drives that shape your day, I don’t take much notice of age. Age kind of runs alongside, like a reality that’s jogging beside you.

If you look at yourself in the mirror and see what the world sees, and you say, “God, I’m this age and I’d better behave like this and this and this because that’s what people expect from a middle-aged woman,” I think that’s going to doom me to a pretty depressing existence. Whereas, if you just be who you are, be who you feel yourself to be – if you feel yourself to be 80 one day, okay then be 80, but if you feel yourself to be 22 the next day, be 22.

But, especially to women, do not buy in to what the world tells you to be … don’t give up on your expectations of sensuality or don’t take the world’s value of you. Develop a sense of your own value and worth and try to defend it from what the world will tell you your value is. Because, for women, the world will value you very much for your external appearances and age is going to impact on that very, very significantly but that’s not having anything to do with the experience of being alive.

[Listen to the interview with Juliet Stevenson online - click here]

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