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It’s no secret that Hollywood hasn’t historically been kind to women over 50. The further you get from the age of 25 in any public-facing job (and private-facing, actually, and not only in Hollywood—fun!), the closer you get to being unceremoniously sidelined. Not so much for the 50-plus women at the 2025 Golden Globes, who emerged as this year’s main characters. From splashy red-carpet dressing (Nicole Kidman in Balenciaga, Viola Davis in Gucci, Pamela Anderson in Oscar de la Renta) to the trophies themselves (Jodie Foster, Demi Moore, and Jean Smart all got gongs), this year proved that Hollywood’s weird obsession with youth is finally starting to get a little old.
It wasn’t just that a lot of older women won awards, though, or shut down the red carpet. They were the ones making the statements. Pamela Anderson, 57, has consistently gone make-up free since 2023. “No stylist, no glam team, it’s just me,” she told Variety on the red carpet. (Wild that a woman showing up with her normal face is considered shocking, but this is where we’re at.) And in a sort of life-imitates-art but the inverse, 62-year-old actress Demi Moore picked up a best performance award for her memorable turn in Coralie Fargeat’s body horror The Substance, in which she plays a “fading” Hollywood star who’s promptly dropped from her TV slot upon turning 50.
“People always ask for something new. At 50, it stops,” she’s told by an exec in the film. In real life, however, Moore’s undergone all manner of creative rebirths.
This idea—that women have an expiration date—is something Moore referenced in her moving acceptance speech. “Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress… that corroded me over time to the point that I thought a few years ago that this was it, that maybe I was complete, maybe I’ve done what I was supposed to do,” she told a completely hushed room. “I’ll just leave you with one thing that this movie is imparting, [which] is, in those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough, or pretty enough, or skinny enough, or successful enough, or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’ And so today I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me and for the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong.”
This isn’t the first time an actress over 50 has spoken about thinking her career was over, only to experience an entirely new beginning. Back at the 2023 Golden Globes, Jennifer Coolidge famously referenced a similar ebb and flow. “I had such big dreams and expectations as a younger person, but what happened is they get sort of fizzled by life,” she said after winning best supporting actress in a limited series for White Lotus. At this year’s Golden Globes, all eyes were on Coolidge once again. At 63, Coolidge is that girl. She’s the cool one that everyone wants to be (or at least be friends with).
Paparazzi going nuts over Jennifer Coolidge #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/7IUkbHotbb
— Live On The Chat (@LiveOnTheChat) January 6, 2025
Even as a woman not in Hollywood, or as a woman watching from afar, it’s comforting seeing so many over-50s front and center. When we’re so often made to feel like there’s an enormous invisible clock ticking above our heads, or that if we haven’t “made it” by 30, then we’ll never make it at all, it’s empowering to come to the realization that this doesn’t have to be the case. That it was a lie to begin with. That so many women over 50, as exemplified by the Golden Globes this year, are really just getting started.
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
