The simple answer is ego. The question is why have there been so many screen pairings of much older men with beautiful women who are young enough to be their daughters?
The more complex answer, however, contains a few more wrinkles. The studios continue to reward these actors for playing heroic studs years long after their female counterparts have been put out to pasture (name one 60-year-old movie femme fatale). And audiences share part of the blame for condoning the double standard.
Current highly curious screen couplings include Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow in "A Perfect Murder," Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in "Six Days, Seven Nights," Warren Beatty and Halle Berry in "Bulworth," and Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas in "The Horse Whisperer." In recent months we've seen Jack Nicholson with Helen Hunt ("As Good as It Gets"), Dustin Hoffman with Sharon Stone ("Sphere), and, of course, Woody Allen with Elisabeth Shue ("Deconstructing Harry").
Each of these actors is more than two decades older than his co-star and, except for Ford and Douglas, are all over 60. (Ford will be 56 in July and Douglas turns 54 in September.)
Vanity certainly plays a part. As Times film critic Kenneth Turan points out, "We're not witnessing one of life's great mysteries here. These men have been great romantic leads and they're finding it very difficult to give that up. Hollywood's not an area where rationality holds sway."
But one female senior studio executive contends that May-December romances are not an anomaly in Hollywood or anywhere else. So movies are just imitating life. And truly, older Texas oil millionaires, Wall Street moguls and politicians rarely have a problem securing young female companions or trophy wives. These captains of industry may be the envy of their peers, but they are also sometimes the butt of late-night talk-show jibes. In real life the age differential doesn't go by unnoticed.
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In Hollywood, though, this behavior has always been sanctioned--at least until recently. Allen's affair and subsequent marriage to Soon-Yi Previn--a woman not only young enough to be his daughter, but actually the adopted daughter of his then-partner, Mia Farrow--brought the age disparity question out of the closet. Critics started lashing back at Allen when he frolicked with Shue and Julia Roberts from "Everybody Says I Love You" on-screen. (Audiences were probably a beat ahead, because Allen hasn't starred in a bona fide hit film since "Hannah and Her Sisters" in the mid-1980s.)
