They Sure Looked Much Older Back Then

And here he is at 5 years old.

For a time I thought Lawrence Fishburne was much older. Interestingly Angela basset played Larry's ex wife and mother to Cuba Gooding in Boys in the Hood. Now she's playing Cuba's sister on American Horror Story.

With Hale, it's simply that fat, balding people look older. James Gandolfini was only 38 when "The Sopranos" started, which is roughly the same age as Ashton Kutcher and Matt Bomer are today.

Balding usually ages men, and no one had hair plugs back then. Plastic surgery was rudimentary and not as common as today. Our idea of aging in celebrities is skewed.

Everyone also smoked and no one knew the dangers of sun damage. Lots of hard drinking, too. A Mad Men lifestyle will age you. Women also had more kids and that takes a lot out of you. I've noticed that childless women age much better if they remotely take care of themselves.

Joseph Kearns. He played Mr. Wilson on Dennis The Menace. He was only 55 years old when he died.

Bob Newhart has always looked like he was in his mid-50s. He looks middle-aged even on his early comedy albums.

This thread makes me think of Danny Meeks

OP: That looks like the handiwork of BOOZE.

Richard Haydn was 36 when Ball of Fire was made.

Aline MacMahon was also 36 in Kind Lady:

Beulah Bondi was 48 in Make Way For Tomorrow. The actress who played her daughter was actually older than her.

[quote]A Mad Men lifestyle will age you.

Unless you're Jon Hamm himself. His hammaconda is still smegtacular!

DL Favorite Viki Sleestak. Here she is in 1971 at age 25 - looking 45.

Vivian Vance was only two years older than Lucille Ball, yet they made her look older. But now that they've "cleaned" the I Love Lucy shows, you can see the wrinkles in Lucy's face. She was supposed to be about 25 but her makeup doesn't hide those smoker's wrinkles around her mouth.

r12, I doubt Jon Hamm was not desmegmatized.

R9. Makeup Richard Haydn played Max Detweiler in the movie The Sound Of Music. Scroll about halfway down.

OP = WeHo queen who can't understand why everyone doesn't look like a Hollywood starlet!

John Slattery was a guy who always played older than his age because he was prematurely gray. I think he was only 30 when he was on Homefront, and his character was probably mid-40's. I remember that Michael Chiklis played older on The Commish. He was one of those fat, bald dudes who looked much older than he was. He was just the right age when he did The Shield and was thinner and more muscular.

Erika Slezak looked 45 almost her entire tenure on OLTL. She was matronly as a young woman, but once she got past middle age, it evened out a bit. Patrick Stewart is another guy who has more or less looked 45 or 50 his entire adult life. Bette Davis never seemed young. Ever.

R2, that speaks more to how well Angela Bassett has aged. Your post makes me want to watch What's Love Got To Do With It. Laurence Fishburne and Angela at their best.

R14, Lucy Ricardo was never said to be 25; she was established as being in her 30's. In the Lucy Tells the Truth episode during the 3rd season (in 1953), Lucy admitted her age was 33. Yeah I know Lucille Ball was 42 at the time, but she was playing a younger character.

R20

Also in the episode where LUCY is desperate to locate her birth certificate so that she can get a passport to go to Europe with Ricky & the Mertzes, there's a scene where she mentions that she was born in 1921. [ LUCILLE BALL was born in 1911]. In the episode, she can't find her birth certificate and she'd gotten word from her hometown of Jamestown's Dept of Records that they couldn't locate a birth certificate on her. Her mother is away so she can't locate her either. She finds a woman [Helen] who used to babysit her as a child and visits her to ask if she'd sign a document verifying that she was there when Lucy was born. Things change however once the woman's husband comes home and the woman has apparently lied to her husband for years that she'd a good dozen years younger than she was. "Yo wouldn't want Helen to perjure herself would you ? "At the end of the show, Lucy finds out that she wasn't born in Jamestown but in West Jamestown and at the show's conclusion, Lucy receives a copy of her birth certificate from her absent minded mother who'd been on a trip.

There are still ridiculous pairings, Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrel's mother ffs in that sword and sandals thing? Women actually old enough to be Farrel's ma presumably look too decrepit by Hollywood standards for the bloody producers and directors.

I'm 40, and some of the people I knew from HS/College look BUSTED on Fbook.

Same here. I'm 30 and I've worked with people my age who always look 10 years older. There are so many guys in their late 20s with receding hairlines and just an old look, like they are someone's dad.

I'd say most of it has to do with diet and sun damage.

R25

I think that's why someone like that JAYCEE DUGARD, the girl who was held captive for 10 years look younger than they are: little exposure to the sun. Same reason why the skin on your ass often looks better than the skin on your nose.

Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton were only in their forties when ""All In The Family" first came on. They looked much older than that. And Rob Reiner looked way too old to be a college student.

Eileen Heckart was 53 years old when she won the Oscar for "Butterflies Are Free." Her hair and makeup, however, ages her 20 years.

Nina Foch was born in 1924, Gene Kelly was born in 1912, yet she plays the "older woman" to the younger Gene Kelly in "An American in Paris".

Do we really need this thread?

Edie McClurg looked like a 40-something frau in [italic]Carrie[/italic] but was actually 25.

Jennifer Saunders was only 34 when Abfab first came out. She is only 8-9 years older than Julia Sawalha.

The new up-and-coming DL fave, Mare Winningham. That mug had her playing 13 at 30 and 22 at 12. Bitch got one of them faces where you just don't know.

i hated the repeats of that shit with a passion.

r20, r21, there were a lot of inconsistencies in that show. The one reason I say Lucy Ricardo was still in her 20s was because of the baby. Back in the 1950s, a woman having a baby in her 30s was odd. Women back then got married and had their babies in their 20s.

Also, her personality seems more like a woman in her 20s. You have to believe that someone that pulls as much shit as she does hasn't had a lot of life experience. To believe that a woman in her 30s is doing that stuff makes it seem like Lucy is socially retarded and we can't really believe that about Lucy Ricardo. In other words, we forgive her shenanigans because she's young.

Denver Pyle, who played Doris Day's father in her drippy TV series, was only two years older than she was. Yet, that relationship was fairly convincing.

Here's a picture of them together.

Ed Asner was 40 when he debuted as Lou Grant on the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

They looked older because all actors drank and did drugs.

I don't think Lucy Ricardo was supposed to be in her twenties in "I Love Lucy. " How could she have been? It was obvious she was not in her twenties. On one of the shows where she makes a bet that she won't tell any lies she admits to being in her thirties. But Lucille Ball was at least 40 when "I Love Lucy" came on the air.

Actors looked older back then because plastic surgery was not the big deal it is now. These days actors look unwrinkled but very weird due to excessive plastic surgeries.

Victoria Sleestack owns this thread. She always looked so god damned old!

Even in the beginning of I Love Lucy, the Ricardo's have been married for 10 Years.

Jared Leto has had plastic surgery?

He's mid-40s.

Gilligan's Island had only three seasons, so Alan Hale would have been 45 at the end of the show, which is astonishing, he looks 65 throughout.

Oh, come on. Alan Hale didn't look 65. He looked like an overweight middle aged man, but he didn't look THAT old.

R42 he'll be 45 in a month. No surgeries or Botox (yet) but he sure takes care of that skin. Also, good genes helps too.

[quote]No surgeries or Botox (yet) but he sure takes care of that skin.

Do you read that in People, hun?

LULZ.

James Baskett, who became the first black man to win an Oscar as Uncle Remus in [italic]Song of the South[/italic], was in his early 40s playing an elderly sharecropper and died of cancer in 1948. He was only 44, and many others in that movie also died before their time.

The first time Lucy Ricardo's age comes up was when she has to tell the truth, it was 33. She was 42 when the episode was filmed in 1952.

You really can't compare the ages of character actors from the the forties and fifties, as they all played older. Ellen Corby was a prime example. She played old spinsters all her life.

Hard to believe that my dear friend G was 54 when she played the virginal ingenue in South Pacific. Why, she didn't look a day over 52!

Ricky's age was mention in an episode as 35, he was really 33.

Ellen Corby was an old spinster. A real cunt.

It just goes to show you that nowadays health care, food and exercise all contribute to looking younger and an improved well-being.

The ILL ep where Lucy gets her eyes dilated during Ricky's eye exam starts out with Lucy and Ethel trying on Lucy's old flapper hat that Ethel wore later for the Varsity Drag song she and Fred did at the club later in the episode. They also reminisce about dancing the Charleston and other 1920s memories that gives an indication of Lucy's actual age.

I own this thread. In Sunset Boulevard. I was just 50. 25 years younger than Jane Fonda today.

Stockard Channing looks younger today than when she made Grease

Shelley Winters was only 52 when she played Belle Rosen in "The Poseidon Adventure." Younger than Julianne Moore, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, etc. Sure, she was in character, but even at the Academy Awards the following year, she looked old.

Buddy Ebsen was 54 when he played Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, having been born in 1908. Irene Ryan was only six years older, being born in 1902 and 60 years old when she played Granny.

Whitman Mayo was only in his mid 40s when he played Grady on Sanford and Son but he looked twenty years older. So much for black don't crack.

Shelly was a babe.

Speaking of Gilligan's Island: Natalie "Lovey" Schafer was 64 when the series started- twelve years older than Jim "Thurston" Backus.

No Lucy was always supposed to be in her 30s because it was established early on that Lucy and Ricky had been married for at least 10 years. It was retrofitted that she met Ricky when she was 20 (on the hour long show when she went to Cuba with Ann Sothern)

[quote]And Rob Reiner looked way too old to be a college student.

He was 24 which was kind of old for a college student back then. Also Gloria's background seemed muddled, because she didn't work and didn't go to college, so what did she do till she met Mike? Nothing?

Funny thing is the two men who played Mike in the pilot (one was called Richard) looked like college students but never worked at all.

I wouldn't know about this, not at all

r38, And we certainly don't do that anymore.

I went from looking like I was eternally 13 years old to looking like I was 113 overnight

From Burns And Allen (radio)

Gracie) How old are you

Woman) I'm going on 36

Gracie) And where are you coming from?

From Burns and Allen (radio)

George) If we're gonna babysit his daughter, we'll have to think of something for her to do. What do little girls like?

Gracie) I can't remember, funny how one or two years will cloud one's memory

Sherman Hemsley was only 36 when he started The Jeffersons (and even younger when he started appearing on AITF). And he was black and tiny and spry so none of the usual excuses apply to why he seemed "older."

I remember an episode of "Green Acres" and as always Eva Gabor looks stunning, but this episode has a young high school student who has a crush on Oliver. As soon as you put this young beautiful girl next to Gabor, she ages 100 years instantly.

Make up application was different then too. It was called "pancake"make-up for a reason. Foundation was thicker and did not match the skin as well as it does today. Blush and eye-shadow spread better on the skin and reflect light differently.

After watching John Carpenter's "The Thing" the other night I went on IMDB to check out the message board and I was shocked..............SHOCKED I tell ya to learn A. Wilfred Brimley was only 47(!) during the filming.

My GOD.....Did he EVER look young?

DVD looked like he was pushing 50, especially around MTM

In North by Northwest, Cary Grant's mother is only a few years older than him.

But that has more to do with the vanity of stars than people aging more back then.