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Do onscreen roles reinforce or undermine popular images of older people, asks Mark Fisher
They’ve been repeating The Sopranos on TV recently – and the 25-yearold series is as good as ever. It still seems like a fresh idea to follow a bunch of New Jersey mafiosi through their domestic lives: school runs, barbecues, visits to the shrink. It is funny to think of a mobster bumping off enemies one day, dealing with anxiety the next.
What also seems fresh is the portrayal of Livia Soprano, mother of crime boss Tony. Played with hard-nosed wit by 71-year-old Nancy Marchand, the part could easily have been written as a clichéd grandparent. Here is a crotchety woman moaning about being moved to a care home and her fellow residents.
All that is true, but also true is the sophisticated game she plays. A master manipulator, Livia knows exactly what her family gets up to and, hiding behind a mask of frailty, ensures they do it the way she wants. She might look ineffectual, but she is an active player who exploits her family’s sympathies. When she fears she will be found out for ordering a hit on her own son, she pretends to have Alzheimer’s. But how typical is her character? Do we not commonly see a picture-book granny, all smiles and talcum-powdered hair? Or worse, do we fail to see older people at all?
In 2009, film critic Anne Billson said she had seen 320 films that year and of those only four had ‘oldish’ lead characters. She believed older audiences were simply not seeing themselves on screen.
In 2025, she revised her opinion. Writing in the Guardian, Billson said Hollywood was catching up: “Leading characters of pensionable age are all over the place.” Now, her complaint was different: older people were pigeonholed into three categories: “feisty, frail or fiendish”.
Feisty, frail or fiendish?
I decided to keep track. Over a long weekend of cultural consumption, I made a note of the older characters I saw on stage and screen. Livia in The Sopranos set me off to an encouraging start. Even if she falls into the fiendish camp, she helps give the series its darkly humorous bite.
Next came Jack Thorne’s ITV series The Hack, about the journalists, politicians and police caught up in News International’s phone-hacking scandal. Central to this is Guardian reporter Nick Davies, played by David Tennant. In a couple of reflective scenes, he is seen in the living room of his father, played by 72-year-old Jonathan Coy. Stiffly pouring tea from a pot, the older man tells his son he is pleased to get a visit in the middle of the day: “These are the good hours… Hips hurt, knees hurt, back hurts till 11am, and then again from 3pm. But 11am til 3pm… Never get old.”
One for the “frail” pile, then, a man all but defined by his infirmity.
Tennant popped up again in The Thursday Murder Club, this time playing Ian Ventham, the baddie in the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s novel about a group of elderly sleuths. At 54, he was considerably younger than the core cast. Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Jonathan Price had an average age of 78. You could tell Ventham was the baddie because he called the others the “walking dead”.
This feels like a step forward. With notable exceptions, such as On Golden Pond and Last of the Summer Wine, it’s rare to see older people leading the story.
In The Thursday Murder Club, the residents of Coopers Chase retirement community solve a murder on their doorstep. They’ve led interesting lives – psychiatrist, union activist, nurse, spy – and now refuse to be limited by their age. “Never use the words ‘bright-eyed feisty old ladies’ in my presence again,” says Helen Mirren’s sharp-minded Elizabeth to Celia Imrie’s excitable Joyce.
Not that the film fully escapes the clichés; it still offers a romanticised image of well-to-do retirement, all purple cardigans, frilly curtains and silvery manes of hair. Many pots of tea and much cake.
Above all, there is an implicit joke that depends on a young person’s perspective: only if you regard old people as cute and sedentary would you laugh when those people show gumption. Is it really so funny to see retired people drinking, swearing and making their way in the world?
Next, I set off to the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, where Ann Louise Ross was playing Tersia in Black Hole Sign, a hospital drama by Uma Nada-Raja. The actor was very funny as a patient alternating between lucidity and delirium, convinced she was heading out to a 1970s disco and mistaking an office chair for a toilet – a forceful woman with a mischievous streak. Yes, she ticked two boxes – frail and feisty – but seemed more than two-dimensional.
Beyond the clichés
I caught up with Ross a couple of weeks later and she agreed it was important for writers to push beyond the easy clichés. “If you’re housebound, the loneliness can be very sad, but people like that still have life in them, still have stories to tell, and it’s not all, ‘Oh, in my day it was better’. They’ve got good, interesting stories,” she said.
As for her own career, Ross has no complaints. At 75, she is still finding rewarding parts and, in one recent case, was even turned down for being too young. “I’m quite happy to do parts as an older woman in a nightie or as an older woman who’s a bit dotty, but I haven’t had a lot of them,” she said.
She cited her role as the shotgun-toting Agnes Moffat in the BBC series Shetland, not least because the fictional Moffat, like Ross, had not long lost a husband.
“It was a bit like art meeting life,” she said of playing a bereaved woman. “She was on a quad bike, she had a rifle, she drove a Land Rover – no make-up, no nothing, no glamour. She was an older woman with a bit of spirit.”
That was also true of her recent role as a retired school teacher in Make It Happen, James Graham’s play about Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin and the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
“She was sharp and able to have a go at Fred the Shred in public,” continued Ross. “I wouldn’t want to describe her as feisty because if I was an older man, I wouldn’t be feisty, I’d be intelligent or bright. It tends to be the women who are described as feisty.”
In raising the question of gender, she highlighted what is perhaps a more widespread issue. If Billson is correct that older people have become better represented, the greater problem could be the kind of stereotyping that can affect actors at any age. Clichés abound, whether it is the phone-addicted teenager, the vegan student or the innocent old lady.
When I spoke to Dolina MacLennan, 87-year-old actor, singer and activist, she added one more category to that list. “The more stereotyped people are Highlanders,” said MacLennan a native Gaelic speaker born on the Isle of Lewis. “We’re always dressed differently. We’re always shabby.
“I had a small part in the film The Queen as a switchboard operator at Balmoral and was dressed like a flump – she would have been very neatly dressed. In another programme, I was dressed in huge big jumpers and waistcoats that, even at my age, I would never put on me.” So, the next time you see an elderly actor on the screen, ask yourself: “Do they mean me?”
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