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Jonathan Winters played newborn Mearth on Mork and Mindy when he was 56.
John Wayne was 55 when he played the role of Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort in The Longest Day, 28 years older than the real Vandervoort was at during WWII.
My recollection is that Jonathan Winters had earlier played a baby on the musical sitcom That’s Life (1968). But he was much younger then.
Problem is, I can’t find any record on the internet that he played the role. Or who played the baby (In at least one episode, an adult actor played the baby, and I’d swear it was Winters)
In The Vikings, Ernest Borgnine played Kirk Douglas’s father, despite being two months younger than him in reality. Of course, this is Fifties Borgnine and Douglas and it also helps that the former is in a shaggy beard, while the “son” is cleanshaven.
In the recent van Gogh biopic, At Eternity’s Gate, 64 year old Willem Dafoe played van Gogh, who of course never made it past 37.
Peter Capaldi at age 59 portrayed the alien Time Lord Doctor Who, a character that, depending on how you look at it, was either about 2000 years old or four and a half billion years old (some time travel and other weirdness involved).
I don’t know how old Angela Lansbury was supposed to be in “The Manchurian Candidate”, where she played the mother of Laurence Harvey’s character, but she was only three years older than Harvey in real life.
In *Medici, Masters of Florence * Richard Madden plays Cosimo De Medici while the actor playing his son is only a few months younger than him.
In Hamlet (1990), Glenn Close (b. 1947) played Mel Gibson (b. 1956)'s mother.
Forrest Gump: Sally Field (b. 1946) played Tom Hanks (b. 1956)'s mother.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986): The three graduating seniors were Ferris (b. 1962), Sloan (b. 1967) and Cameron (b. 1956), the most age-inappropriate threesome since Mary Shelley, Percy Bysche Shelley, and Lord Byron.
In Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Olivia Hussey (b.1951) played Mary, mother of Jesus, even though she was only 26 and Jesus was supposedly 33 at the time. Robert Powell (b.1944), who played Jesus, would have been 33 when the movie was made.
Hey! Elizabeth Banks and Bradley Cooper were only in their late twenties playing teenagers in that movie!
The astonishing one in that movie was Abe Vigoda. He already looked ancient. But he was only fifty.
Stockard Channing was 34 when she played teenager Rizzo in Grease
Lansbury was 39; she could have been playing around 49, so 10 years off. It could be argued that Harvey, at 36, was several years older than his character would likely have been. It isn’t clear from the film whether Harvey’s character was a career soldier or not, but the draft was in effect in the Korean war, and given all the background circumstances I presume he was a draftee who got out as soon as he could, putting him well under 30. So that makes it a little less creepy and Lansbury was probably off about the same number of years just in the opposite direction.
I find it curious how Weezie from The Jeffersons and Florida from Good Times were such cougars. Isabel Sanford was 20 years older than Sherman Hemsley, and Esther Rolle was almost 19 years older than John Amos.
No mention of Sabrina? In the original, Spanky Hepburn was at least 7 years older than her character. There was a remake, in which Julia Ormond (30) played the, what was she supposed to be, 17, 18? According to IMDb, other actors they considered were Sandra Bullock (31), Catherine Zeta-Jones (26) and Juliette Binoche (31) – all because Winona Ryder (24) was afraid to take it on.
Looks like I get to list my favorite example:
Wifred Bramble, Paul’s very clean little old man grandfather in A Hard Day’s Night, was 52 at the time of filming. Had already played other characters much older than his actual age.
In Clifford, 44-year-old Martin Short played a ten-year-old.
More convincingly, Bel Powley (at 23) played a 13-year-old in The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
In the category of Magically Ageless Persons, there’s David Bennent in The Tin Drum and Tilda Swinton in about half the films she’s made to date, including Orlando, Doctor Strange and the Narnia movies.
Invoking the sci-fi codicil, Walter Jameson.
I know none of you saw this since it was a local community theater production of 1776. The actor playing Edward Rutledge, the youngest of the representatives in that Congress, was at least in his 50s, if not his 60s, with gray hair and many wrinkles. They might have gotten away with it if not for the line that specifically mentions he’s the youngest. Yeah, I know, community theater works with what it has, but there were younger men in the cast and they could have shifted some roles…