That was makeup?
Look at her as she appeared out of makeup in 1989:
Vs. in makeup as Sophia Petrillo:
Yeah, I thought the Sophia was just Estelle without makeup.
Well, to be honest, they’re both “in makeup.” Just different kinds of makeup.
Estelle Getty was actually a year younger than Bea Arthur, who played her daughter in the series. *
*Just like Lionel Jeffries was six months younger than Dick van Dyke, even though Jeffries played van Dyke’s father in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Of course, there are a LOT of cases where actors playing parents of other actors’ characters are ju7st barely older – Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in the third Indiana Jones movie, Jessie Landis and Cary Grant in North by Northwest, and so on.
The best aging makeup I ever saw was in I, Claudius. I started watching in the middle of the series, and never saw Brian Blessed (Augustus) without the makeup until I went back and saw the early episodes. He was totally convincing. Sian Phillips (Livia), is now about the age her character was, and looks very much like she did in makeup then.
In about ten years, I’d like them to reshoot the epilogue from Harry Potter, with Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, and Bonnie Wright reprising their 40ish characters (Tom Fenton, too). You’d have to recast the kids, though.
(Felton)
I’m on my phone, which makes it very hard to post a link, but twenty-something Karen Gillan was transformed into a mid-forties middle-aged woman in the Doctor Who episode “The Girl Who Waited”. I thought that was one of the best age makeups I’d seen. (Granted, twenty-five to forty-five is probably easier than twenty-five to eighty-five.)
Let’s see if I can make this work: She went from this: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--XkWKIgDn--/17zuiz1m62tljjpg.jpg
to this: http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/girl-who-waited.jpg
Part of the problem is that very often all they do with the hair is sprinkle it with flour. OK, they may be using something other than flour, but that’s what it looks like. No streaks, no all-white hair, just the actors’ dark hair with a sprinkling of flour, looking nothing at all like salt-and-pepper hair.
Look at Clive Dunn, especially his role as Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army. Dunn was very good at portraying older people.
I still like Max Von Sydow in The Exorcist. He was only in his mid-forties, but Fr. Merrin still looks older than Von Sydow does now.
I guess casting out demons really does age one prematurely.
In the last episodes of the 2002 version of The Forsyte Saga, Damian Lewis did a phenomenal job of playing an elderly man. He did have makeup to wrinkle his skin and grey out his hair, but as you say, a huge part of the convincining-ness his performance was his posture and mannerisms. He just transformed his whole self into a brittle old man; it was amazing.
Just what I came in to say. Best-ever old-age makeup on a young actor, I think. From this, https://d166p16y7lrz7l.cloudfront.net/media/3d95cb9a8eae139749971b63eccc06cb.png, to this: The Golden State: Image. Utterly convincing.
Makeup can help, but looking old has a LOT to do with the way an actor carries himself.
In the movie Mr. Saturday Night, both Billy Crystal and David Paymer play elderly men. Crystal had a ton of latex on his face, but he never FELT like an old man, because he never MOVED like an old man.
By contrast, with minimal makeup, Paymer was a much more believable old-timer because he walked and comported himself like an old man.