Actor's Ages Relative to Roles They Play

I don't know. Hollywood before considered older men as vivacious, irresistable, charming! Look at Gone with the Wind... Clark Gable is so much older than Vivien Leigh and the audience didn't mind.

In the original The Manchurian Candidate Angela Lansbury played Laurence Harvey's mother. She was five years older than he was.

Here's another age discrepancy example (also involving Cary Grant). In the movie NORTH BY NORTHWEST, Cary Grant's character's mother was played by Jessie Royce Landis, who was either the same age as Cary or a year older at most.

Sabrina comes to mind. Humphrey Bogart was 54; William Holden was 36; and Audrey Hepburn was 25. Bogart and Holden were supposed to be brothers--and 18 year age difference--and it shows. Audrey Hepburn falls in love with both of them and Bogart really does look old enough to be her father.

L

The age thing kind of bothered me. For middle-aged people to be finding true love for the first time raises all kinds of issues that are never dealt with. I know its just a movie and all and we can accept that an actor is portraying a character at a different age, but I'm a year younger than Cary Grant was when this movie was filmed, and I already have two grandchildren.

The age difference in real life between Cary Grant and his 'grandmother' Cathleen Nesbitt is the most ironic. Nesbitt was only fifteen years older than Grant, meaning that Grant was closer in age to her than to Deborah Kerr, and Nesbitt is more believable as an older sister than even a mother to Grant, let alone a grandmother.

To answer your question about other age discrepancy examples, how about the 1948 version of Hamlet? Laurence Olivier at age 41 cast himself as the troubled young prince, and the actress playing his mother was only 28.

An Affair to Remember was released in 1957. That year Cary Grant was 53 years old. In the movie he and Deborah Kerr visit his grandmother. Kathleen Nesbitt, the very fine actress playing his 82 year old grandmother, was in real life just 33 years older than Cary Grant

To make matters even worse than you described, in real life Cathleen Nesbitt was only 69 in 1957, not 82 as was her character.

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Get the facts first - you can distort them later!
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An Affair to Remember was released in 1957. That year Cary Grant was 53 years old. In the movie he and Deborah Kerr visit his grandmother. Kathleen Nesbitt, the very fine actress playing his 82 year old grandmother, was in real life just 33 years older than Cary Grant. Kind of a young grandmother, don't you think?
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She was 33 years older than Deborah Kerr. Too young to be her grandmother too.

But Cary Grant is in a league of his own. I'm under 20 and I would have gone out with him in a heartbeat. Whatever it is he had, age didn't dim it.


I guess it's like looking at clouds. You see one thing and I see another. Peace.

Blue Hawaii: Angela Lansbury plays Elvis Presley's mother, but she's only 10 years older than he.