Abstract
As the essays in this collection attest, celebrities can offer powerful designs for living; models of how to embody different identities successfully. This includes the highly fraught proposition of how to age and, caught in the middle of both misogyny and gerontophobia, women’s negotiation of the ageing process presents particular challenges. It is therefore unsurprising that there should be a thirst for aspirational female role models; those women in the public eye who are seen to have ‘aged well’, neither resisting the bodily changes that ageing brings nor giving into them too easily and ‘letting oneself go’. This pertains to many prominent women, from politicians to musicians, television presenters to sportswomen, but star actresses provide a particularly rich panoply of public images of ageing, from those culturally deemed successful to those designated failed or flawed. They therefore offer especially rich terrain for an examination of discourses of female ageing.
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© 2015 Melanie Williams
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Williams, M. (2015). The Best Exotic Graceful Ager: Dame Judi Dench and Older Female Celebrity. In: Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137495129_10
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