If you want a long acting career, you'd better be British

Follow Us

It's a Hollywood cliché: Pass age 40 (or 30 or 25), and your options as an actress disappear. But that may be changing, with the rise of a subgenre of movies starring older actors geared toward older audiences. Most recently, there's The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the uncreatively named sequel to 2011's surprise hit about a group of Brits who "outsource" their retirement to India. The film features a lineup that reads like a who's who of British acting elder statesmen (and women): Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie.

And films like Marigoldare successful. After one weekend, the sequel has already made $8.5 million to add to the first installment's $46.4 million domestic gross — almost five times its production budget. They're part of a growing cottage industry of movies built around older stars — many of them British. There's been Maggie Smith's Quartet (2012), also set at a retirement home, which managed to reel in $18.4 million; Helen Mirren's The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014) did even better, bringing in $54.2 millionPhilomena(2013), starring Judi Dench, crowned its $38 million American gross with four Oscar nominations. Read more...

More about Movies, Hollywood, United Kingdom, Entertainment, and Film