“Women”? The fact that you can only manage to shrink the “age window difference” down as small five years by including the two years before an actress even reaches legal majority reveals how ridiculous this comparison is.
[QUOTE=Ellis Dee]
Jennifer Lawrence is only 25 right now, but has had a pretty good career as a leading lady for a while now. Her first leading role, not as a love interest but as the actual main character of a feature film, was eight years ago.
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You mean The Poker House where she played an abused 14-year-old? :dubious:
No, showing young actresses playing children doesn’t count as part of their “window” for leading lady roles on a par with leading man roles. FFS, if they did then you’d also have to say that the “leading man window” starts at 12 or thereabouts with Daniel Radcliffe’s lead role in Harry Potter. :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=Ellis Dee]
Compare to Brad Pitt, who was already 28 when he got that bit part in Thelma & Louise, started getting leading roles in his 30s and is currently aging out of leading roles now at 53. Or George Clooney, who was 33 when he got his first major role on ER.
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Note that Pitt is about to appear as, guess what, the leading man in the 2016 romantic thriller Five Seconds of Silence, while George Clooney is still going strong in leading-man roles at 54. Harrison Ford, of course, continued to play leading-man roles into his 60s, even if you don’t count his recent Star Wars reprise. So I’m quite skeptical of your “aging out” claim about male actors in general not being viable leading men after 51.
Moreover, plenty of actors start their leading-man roles younger than 25, such as Robert Pattinson at 22 (even if you don’t count his schoolboy role in Harry Potter three years earlier, which I’m guessing you would if he were an actress), and Leonardo diCaprio at 23.
So a more realistic but still quite conservative version of the “leading role window” would be something like 24-56 for men, and 18-38 for women: i.e., 32 years versus 20.