The industry term "gerontophilia" (the casting of older men with much younger women) was so normalized it had a clinical name, while its opposite—the complex, sexual, powerful older woman—was relegated to the roles of "the witch," "the nagging wife," or "the ghost."

The trope was relentless: the "Cougar" (predatory), the "Crone" (wise but sexless), or the "Invisible Woman" (the grocery store extra). Meryl Streep, perhaps the greatest living actress, admitted in the early 2000s that she stopped being offered leads at 40; suddenly, the scripts were for "witches or grandmothers."

For decades, the arithmetic of Hollywood was brutally simple: A leading man aged gracefully into his sixties, swapping action heroics for statesman gravitas. Meanwhile, his female co-star—often twenty years his junior—faced the guillotine of irrelevance the moment the first fine line appeared beside her eye.