OK I guess I was naive not to think of plastic surgery for Cruise.
I saw a clip of Bluto (Senator Blutarsky) from Aniimal House and it was remarkable how young he looked - what maybe two years before Blues Brothers?
Anyways, Blair Brown is 78 and this is the “oldest looking” photo I could find of her. (They co-starred in “Continental Divide”)
I saw Jack Nicholson on a list of celebrities who aged poorly. The list included Brigette Bardot and both her and Nicholson must have been in their early 80s. The list would show a photo of actors in their 20s or 30s and then another of actors in the 70s or 80s and we were supposed to be shocked. It was just clickbait I guess. Brigette Bardot looked just fine for a woman in her 80s. Was she hot like she was in 1960? No. But what reasonable person expects that?
(bolding mine)
I’m not going to keep looking for and posting the “oldest looking photos” (glad Val Kilmer hasn’t been posted) yet Bridget is 90 and still alive. Hot? She is 90.
Stars like Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Jane Fonda, anyone who looks far younger than any regular person of the same age, you can bet has had help. Sure, a few humans don’t show their age, but it’s exceedingly rare. It’s really unfair to compare them to anyone who has aged without artificial help. Or to anyone whose primary role is no longer a movie star and just lives their lives like you or I do.
I’ve been guilty myself of bringing up actors in past threads who’ve aged comparatively badly after leaving Hollywood.
There are two factors.
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Simple prurience.
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The reality that we can cue up a 1960s Brigette Bardot film any time and see her now as the young woman she was then. She’s walking, talking, and living life as a young person for 90 minutes on-screen. Somehow that person frozen in time is still “real” in a way that somebody else from her high school class who wasn’t in film cannot now be. Now-aged Brigette is still in competition with, or at least comparable to, long ago young Bridgette.
Yes, there are snapshots of you and me as teens or college kids. But the "young person is still real " effect is not nearly as strong.
What will be interesting to me is with the vast amount of video being taken of ordinary people nowadays, will this effect change for them as they age?
When fifty years from now any random 70yo will have access to GB of video of them being themselves in their 20s, will they have a greater or lesser appreciation of aging? Will they feature in their own “before and after” comparison posters, even if only in the privacy of their own head? Will that affect how they react to public before/after posters of public figures?
I’m with you. Plastic surgery, hair dye, he’ll even implants, can only do so much. His fairly youthful looks at 63 go beyond that.
One is that his basic look was “boyish” and I think that look stays youngish looking longer. Two he works hard at staying fit, both by his nutrition choices and his exercise plan. That has direct impact on his build of course, but it really is true that those things have impact on biological aging.
And genes make a difference too.
So, we’re all going to discount that just maybe getting clear really works, are we?
/s
Weird if scientologists didn’t use Cruise as proof that way.
Mr. Dibble. Mr. Dibble. Mr. Dibble. Mr. Dibble. Mr. Dibble. You’re glib!
Firstly, it’s a bit quaint seeing this as a webpage; for at least the last 3 years there have been an abundance of then and now videos on tiktok, youtube etc, below is one for Top Gun (I had to break the http part because I was getting the “embed videos” error again).
In terms of appearances, they are a combination of looking their age, vs Tom Cruise as an outlier, but he’s never stopped being a star, so he has a trainer, nutritionist etc on top of whatever cosmetic work he’s had done, incentivized to color his hair etc.
I don’t know why, but I do find it interesting to see how people have aged, but I don’t judge.
I think there is a tendency for some to assume that people who’ve aged well have lived healthily, and those who are showing their age to have not taken sufficient care. When my opinion is that a lot of it is luck of the draw, like being born pretty in the first place. Or that people with noticeable plastic surgery should have left nature alone, just like so-and-so (who also has had stuff done, it was just a better result).
h t tps://www.youtube.com/shorts/cxddKJ52Xp8/
Here you go …
A lot of the times when we see Tom Cruise, he’s got the advantage of makeup and lighting to help make himself look good. I’m not saying he’s a bad looking guy, but in more candid shots he looks good for a guy in his early 60s but terrible for a man in his early 30s. i.e. I think he looks his age.
add: good money … I somewhere read (probably a dubious internet source) that Ricky Martin spends about $10k per month to look (as good) as he does.
i guess there is also the effect of - basically some time in your 70ies or 80ies, you stop to age and you start to desintegrate to a noticeable extent.
You go from “not great, but ok” to “any minor mishap happening to your skeleton/muscles/connecting tissue/skin could cause your death in the next weeks/months”.
dont worry about those … they will get lost …