Research shows older women are winning more Oscars – here's why
Getty ImagesTraditionally, younger actresses have been favoured by the Oscars – but as statistics highlight, that's changing. Is it a sign that female ageism in the film industry is on its way out?
When Michelle Yeoh collected her best actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2023, aged 60, she declared, "Ladies, don't let anybody tell you [that] you are ever past your prime. Never give up."
That Yeoh felt the need to say that publicly reflects her position as one of only seven women who've been over the age of 60 when they've won the best actress trophy. Only one winner, Jessica Tandy, has been over 80; only one other, Katharine Hepburn, was over 70.
The Academy Awards voters have traditionally favoured women in their 20s and 30s, with a clear discrepancy in winners' ages between the best actor and best actress category. Adrien Brody remains the only best actor winner under 30, while 32 actresses have won in their 20s.
AlamyBut times have been, slowly but surely, changing. BBC research shows that the average age of best actress nominees has been consistently increasing decade by decade. So whereas the average age of a best actress nominee was 27 in the 1940s, it rose to 37 by the 1970s and 40 by the 2000s, while in the 2020s so far, it is 47. Alongside Yeoh, recent winners include Renée Zellweger (50), Frances McDormand (63) and Jessica Chastain (45), while recent nominees also include Annette Bening (65), Brazil's Fernanda Torres (59), and Demi Moore (62) – even if, as last year's favourite for the prize, the latter was beaten to it by 25-year-old Mikey Madison for Anora.
That a best actress nominee was averagely aged 27 in the 1940s reflects an industry that prioritised youthful women. In her 2007 book The Star Machine, writer and film historian Professor Jeanine Basinger says of the industry: "It was tough for a woman to last… Glamorous women were a fragile product… the camera was a cruel observer, and it saw age… If a female star could last for a decade, she really paid off. If she could last for two decades, she was a phenomenal success. If she lasted longer than that, she was a miracle, and today we can call her a legend."
The stars of that era included Oscar winners such as Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman and Vivien Leigh, who all won the best actress trophy in their 20s. (Perhaps the "miracle" Basinger talks about was Katharine Hepburn, who holds the record for most best actress trophies and won three of them over the age of 60.)
The factors creating the shift
Dr Stacy L Smith, the founder of USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, a global think tank studying issues of inequality in entertainment, tells the BBC that now, when it comes to "prestige" films – the kind that attract awards interest – a woman has a longer career span.
"When we started this work in 2007, I would always joke about that you had to be named Judi [Dench] Maggie [Smith] or Meryl [Streep] to work as an older woman in Hollywood. And I just don't think that that's the case anymore," she says. "You have a greater range of roles available within films of this type and there's less bias or less focus on younger women carrying the story."
Also she points out that "these days the Academy is recognising films that typically make less money – they're more artsy, art-house driven content. And [within those] there's a real appreciation for the craft of an actor."
Elizabeth Kaiden, the co-founder of The Writers Lab, an organisation supporting female screenwriters over the age of 40, tells the BBC that veterans actresses with decades of experience "are now having films built for them" – something that was rare until recently.
"It's been proved star actresses can come and have long careers," she says. "These are the Meryl Streeps, the Helen Mirrens, the Nicole Kidmans. They're able to attract writers, directors and producers who can see their value when it comes to casting a mature star. We are increasingly seeing films about complex women with some life experience, and that skews the [age of best actress winners] north of where it used to be."
It's also been nearly a decade since the #OscarsSoWhite and #Metoo campaigns saw demands for greater equality and diversity within the Academy. Some of those efforts bore fruit: since 2021, two female directors, Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion, have won Oscars – although they were still only the second and third women to ever do so – while six have been nominated.
Many of those female writer-directors choose female protagonists: in 2025, 47-year-old Coralie Fargeat was nominated for a best director Oscar for The Substance, with Demi Moore in the lead role. And in 2024, 45-year-old French director Justine Triet won an Oscar for best screenplay for Anatomy of a Fall as well as being nominated for best director. Her film starred 45-year-old German actress Sandra Hüller, another best actress nominee that year.
"I think more women are getting into the position where they can choose the material they want and then make it," Kaiden says. "Jessie Buckley's Oscar-nominated role this year has come from Hamnet, with both the book and the screenplay written by women, and Chloé Zhao at the helm of the film. Zhao's previous film Nomadland starred Frances McDormand who was in her 60s. That film probably would never have been made 50 years ago, and nor would Chloé Zhao have ever had an opportunity to make it."
"The position of the female director is really, really critical to this change," Smith attests. "Even back in 2010, we looked at what happened to a production if you have a woman director behind the camera, and we found that if that was the case, you had more girls and women as leading or speaking characters and you had more women over the age of 40 on screen."
Getty ImagesAnother factor in the Oscars' increasing celebration of older actresses may be the fact that the Academy has also swelled its ranks to include more international voters, which has in turn led an increase in world cinema titles gaining nominations. This may have shaken things up, Smith says, because while in the US, "there is still a large pro-youth bias", that is less the case in other areas of the world: "The cultural concerns around this topic [of ageing] vary from country to country," as she puts it.
Walter Salles's I'm Still Here and Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez both had mature female leads – and both 59-year-old Fernanda Torres and 52-year-old trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón were nominated in the best actress category in 2025. In 2017, French actress Isabelle Huppert was nominated at the age of 63 for her role as a rape survivor in Paul Verhoeven's French-language drama Elle.
The progress still to be made
In fact, though, the increasing average age of best actress nominees at the Oscars is outpacing the rest of Hollywood. USC Annenberg has researched Hollywood's 100 top highest-grossing films each year since 2007; in unpublished data given to the BBC, the average age of a female lead or co-lead in these films in 2025 was 34 years old. The average for her male equivalent in the same year was 42 years. And the average age in that category for a woman has never been over the age of 36 since the study began – recalling the double standards another Oscar nominee, Maggie Gyllenhaal, went public with in 2015 when she told of how, aged 37, she was considered "too old" to play opposite a 55-year-old male actor.
More like this:
• Why the Oscars peaked in 1998
The most recent study from Annenberg also found that from Hollywood's top 100 films last year, there were only four women aged 45 plus who featured as a lead or co-lead, and one was a voice character in an animation: Ginnifer Goodwin in Zootopia 2. None of them were women of colour. By contrast, there were 31 men in the same age bracket who qualified as leads or co-leads in these movies, including actors such as Anthony Mackie, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Dwayne Johnson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pedro Pascal and Tom Cruise.
"You can't tell me that over this age on screen, there aren't qualified female actors able to do [protagonist] roles," Smith tells the BBC. "Really, this is discrimination. And I guarantee you, it's also a finite group of women that are getting those opportunities to play those roles on screen," she adds about the number of older actresses who might be considered able to carry a commercial, big budget film, as opposed to a more arthouse, "prestige" project.
Older female screenwriters, according to Kaiden and The Writers Lab co-founder Nitza Wilon, are equally still under-represented in popular film-making. In data given to the BBC, their study found that out of 511 US feature films released during 2025, only 12% were written by women over the age of 40 (and only 20% were written by women overall).
"The distance between the Academy Awards versus reality is quite far," Wilon says. "I don't think we can use the Oscars as a reliable source of what's really going on in the world. The Academy Awards is a spectacle. It's considered to be entertainment, not news. I'm excited by Demi Moore being 62 when she was nominated for The Substance, but she's also a woman who does not look her age. Hollywood is a bubble. It's not normal."
Sony Pictures ClassicsAnother report published last month, It's a Man's (Celluloid) World by The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, has even grimmer news for women over 60 in Hollywood. Only 2% of major female characters in Hollywood's top grossing films in 2025 were over that age: they include Jamie Lee Curtis in Freakier Friday and Amy Madigan in Weapons (Madigan has also been nominated for an Oscar this year, in the best supporting actress category). The report's author, Dr Martha Lauzen, adds that male characters also sharply decline when they're in their 50s, but men over 60 still accounted for 8% of major roles: four times that of women.
Certainly, Lauzen warns against complacency in the industry when it comes to female ageism, despite the hope offered by the Oscars.
"When the public see Frances McDormand or Demi Moore nominated for a best actress Oscar, many of them assume that ageism in the business is a thing of the past," she says. "But for older women on screen, their numbers [still] begin to plummet in their late 30s and early 40s and continue to decline into their 50s. By the time they reach their 60s, they become virtually invisible. And I think that's one of the reasons why films with older female protagonists tend to capture our attention. We rarely see them."
--
If you liked this story, sign up for the Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
