The community theater production of 1776 that I was in had the same situation, although the age difference was not quite so stark. Our Rutledge was in his mid-forties, and looked it. Meanwhile, right across the aisle from this “youngest” member of Congress, was another actor who was eighteen, and looked even younger!
The thing about Rutledge is that you’ve got to find a singer good enough to perform “Molasses to Rum,” which is a challenging tenor song. I know that eighteen-year-old, nice as he was, couldn’t have handled it. The mid-forties guy nailed it every night.
James Cagney was about 43 years old when Yankee Doodle Dandy came out. He played George M. Cohan both as a newborn (43 years difference, infinite difference in percentage terms) and as a 61-year-old man (18 year difference, 42 percent older), and almost every age in between.
The great James Hong plays David Lo Pan in the movie Big Trouble in Little China. When the movie came out Hong was 57 and he played a character who was cursed by an Emperor who ruled in the 200s BC. So 2200 years diff plus or minus.
I could have swore that Cary Grant’s mother in North by Northwest was younger than him, but Jessie Royce Landis was at least a few years older, even being born in a different century. Am I confusing it with something else similar?
Similarly, I was very confused by Taken 3. (I think it was 3, but it may have been 2.)
In the first Taken, 25-year-old Maggie Grace plays Liam Neeson’s 17-year-old daughter, and it goes downhill from there. in one of the sequels – Grace was 29 for Taken 2 and 31 for Taken 3 – her dad teaches her how to drive a car because she’s playing a teenager.
The whole time I was confused. I never realized her character was supposed to be a teenager. I just kept thinking “Why is this 30-year-old woman getting driving lessons from her dad?”
Peter Capaldi was a bit jarring in the series, because it seemed like every transformation of the Doctor took on a more or less younger appearance than his predecessor, with a couple exceptions, but Capaldi did not fit well in the progression.
They had to do something to break the pattern, otherwise you’d have to follow Matt Smith with an actual teenager, and that would have just been awkward.
Thelma Harper on Mama’s Family was played by Vicki Lawrence, who was 16 years younger than Ken Berry and Carol Burnett, who played her children, Vinton and Eunice. She was born in 1949, but played a character who graduated high school before or during the war years and remembered them fondly. Lawrence was 34 when the show started but Thelma/Mama was ~60. I see her on daytime TV ads sometimes dressed as Mama, and it amuses me that she used to be a young woman playing a much older woman, but now she’s playing the same character who at this point is younger than she is.
Among the cast of “high school teenagers” in Napoleon Dynamite, Jon Heder (Napoleon) was 27 and Effren Ramirez (Pedro) was 31. I’d say they both pulled it off very well.
One that works the other way: Shirley Henderson was 40 when she played Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. That’s not too far off, for the character’s “magical age” of 50ish. But Myrtle is a ghost, and so her appearance was fixed at the time of her death… at the age of 12.
King Richard III of England was 33 when he died. The actors who play him on stage and screen are usually considerably older: Laurence Olivier, 48; Ian McKellan, 56.
First exclude actors playing somebody older than themselves. That is relatively easy, with makeup. The other way round is much harder, but many high school movies are made by actors who are old even for university students.
The need to use established stars means that many war films have soldiers (mainly the grunts and very junior officers) who would be a bit too old for military service.
In Operation Daybreak Anton Diffring (age 59) played Reinhard Heydrich (age 38). And Diffring was Jewish, too.
