There’s a bit of a kerfuffle in the GOT thread (when isn’t there one?) about the age of Sansa. There seems to be some disbelief that she is a young girl when it is obvious the actor is not. Turns out, Sophie Turner really is a teenager. But it did bring up the fact that characters that are supposed to be young are played by much older actors.
I’m looking for the biggest spread in the supposed age of a character and the age of the actor playing them. I don’t mean “trick” characters like one who ages backwards or young actors made up to look old. I’m talking straight up non-stage made up playing out of age.
One example from movies that come to mind is Stacey Dash in Clueless. She’s playing a high school senior and was damn near 30 years old at the time. Also Diana Ross’ Dorothy in the Wiz. Although they did age up the character a teeny bit and made her a young school teacher, I think Diana out aged her character by a good 20 years.
Mary Pickford played Little Lord Fauntleroy when she was 29, and when she was 34, did a film called Sparrows, where she played a young teen, who is about 14 or 15. If you aren’t familiar with her work, she was actually quite convincing. She wasn’t quite 5 feet tall, and that helped, but she was also a really good actress, who could move like a child. It was remarkable, really.
These were both silent, B&W films, so she didn’t have to worry about how she sounded-- although she did have a child-like voice, which is probably why she didn’t make the transition to talkies, and the B&W helped make her skin look more youthful, but she really did look young.
Not in a film, and not for the whole play, but I saw Richard Harris* playing King Arthur in Camelot onstage in the 1980s. He was in his 50s, but looked a lot older, and the sight of him at the beginning as a circa 20-year-old Arthur was REALLY hard to believe.
*Harris had played Arthur in the 1967 film version of the play, back when he was only 37.
I’m not sure what the big deal is. The actresses who play the Stark girls were the same age as the characters when the series started 4 years ago. Don’t blame them for getting older faster than HBO can film each season.
Ian McKellen played Shakespeare’s Richard III on screen at age 56, when Richard actually died at age 33, but Richard has typically been played as middle-aged. In a movie called* Tower of London* by Roger Corman, 51-year-old Vincent Price plays him; this film has no pretensions toward historical accuracy, though.
Regarding Hamlet: most scholars agree that Shakespeare changed his mind about the age of the character, and started him out as very young, but later wrote him as about ten years older; however, he never went back and corrected the age in the earlier part of the play. Probably because the company wanted to get on with the production.
Moaning Myrtle, from Harry Potter, is a ghost who died somewhere in her teens, and thus should have stopped aging at that point… But the actress who played her, Shirley Henderson, was 40 at the time Goblet of Fire was filmed.
In the miniseries of The Mists of Avalon, 44-year-old Joan Allen played 13-year-old Morgause at the beginning of the story. A spread of 31 years, which is extreme as these things go.
Kind of a cheat because it’s just his voice, but Curtis Armstrong (‘Booger’ from Revenge of the Nerds) voices Steve’s friend (semi-coincidentally called ‘Snot’) on American Dad! He’s supposed to be 14, when in fact Armstrong is 60! He’s got one of those recognizable voices (and to a degree faces) that never seems to age.