Act your age! Hollywood men star with much younger lovers

Analysis of more than 400 blockbusters finds male stars in their 50s are paired with women in their 20s.

Rebecca Ferguson and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. Cruse is 21 years older than Ferguson.

When Tom Cruise starred in Top Gun aged 23, his character’s ­romantic interest was played by Kelly McGillis, an actor five years his senior at 28. In last year’s Edge of Tomorrow (Thursday), he was 51, but his leading lady, Emily Blunt, was 31.

Analysis of more than 400 blockbuster films has found that even when Hollywood’s male stars reach their 50s or 60s they are still paired with female co-stars who are in their 20s and 30s.

Over the course of his career, the age gap between Cruise and his leading ladies has widened. At 21, he was two years younger than Rebecca De Mornay in 1983’s Risky Business.

He was 12 years older than a 27-year-old Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky in 2001 and 18 years older than 32-year-old Olga Kurylenko in Oblivion in 2013.

Analysis by GraphJoy, an American site, found that the age gap starts to increase once a male actor passes 35. Up to the age of 35, Cruise was on average 1.25 years older than his leading ladies. Since then the average difference is 12.55 years.

The worst example is Denzel Washington, who since turning 35 has been on average 15.33 years older than his female co-stars. He was 54 when he starred alongside a 26-year-old Mila Kunis in The Book of Eli in 2010. The average age gap for Harrison Ford since he turned 35 has been 13.89 years, while Arnold Schwarzenegger’s has been 13.14 years. Brad Pitt and George Clooney have age gaps of 7.18 and 5.86 years respectively.

The data, which analysed the 20 leading male actors between 1980 and 2015, shows that more than a third of Hollywood films feature a male actor who is 10 or more years older than their female stars, and about 7 per cent of films feature a male lead who is 20 or more years older than the female lead.

Only in about 10 per cent of films is the man younger than the woman.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, star of Donnie Darko and The Dark Knight, said this year: “I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me.”

Amy Schumer, the American comedian, teamed up with Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette and Julia Louis-Dreyfus for a comedy sketch in which Dreyfus says that every actor reaches a point where the industry decides that she is no longer sexually attractive. Fey said: “You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks’s love interest in Punchline and then, like 20 minutes later, she was his mom in Forrest Gump?” Field was 41 and Hanks 32. It was six years later when she played his mother.

The Pool website said: “Men can go on being sexy hunks long into their 50s and 60s, but women over 35 must become mums or ­peripheral characters”.

The creators of the Bond films were praised for pairing Daniel Craig, at 47, with Monica Bellucci, 50, in Spectre, but the other Bond girls are played by Lea Seydoux, 30, and Stephanie Sigman, 28.

The Times