The Confidence Collection is back! There’s not a single person on the planet who hasn’t suffered a crisis of confidence at one point or another (TRUST us!). SO, we present The Confidence Collection, (click here for our previous editions!) brought to you by our pals at Caci. We’ll be covering all areas of self-belief in all areas of life – dating, work, relationships, beauty and personal growth – with practical advice, words of wisdom from women who have seen it, lived it and conquered it, and everything in between.
In this edition, we delve into one of Capsule’s biggest shared loves – The Golden Girls, of course – as Alice O’Connell explores how being 50 has changed, and how confidence, beauty and joie de vivre has transformed the big 5-0.
Every now and then I receive a piece of information that seems to rip the fabric of time – and a little piece of my sanity along with it.
Let me give you a wee example from a few weeks ago. I was stuck in traffic and my brain began to wander to all those places it normally reserves for when I’m zoning out washing my hair, or can’t sleep at 3am. This time, it apparently meant thinking about Murder She Wrote and Angela Lansbury. Of course.
Yes, I am an elderly millennial who had elderly choices in TV as a youngster (did we have any other choice when there were only three channels?). I grew up on the likes of M*A*S*H and The Golden Girls. Plus Murder She Wrote, which was about Jessica Fletcher – a charming, but shrewd mystery writer, who lived in a sleepy little costal town where she somehow managed to solve a real murder mystery each week.
Now, Jessica was a widow in the show and a retired schoolteacher who had taken up writing in her retirement (read: old). She wore lots of woolen cardigans and as a kid I assumed she must be in her 80s. She was retired! She was a widow! She wore pearls and twinsets! But Angela only died a few years ago in her late nineties… so, how do those numbers add up?
Of course, the moment I turned off my ignition, I immediately googled it: Angela was only 57 – FIFTY SEVEN – on the show, but was presented as being 75. I was surprised, but also not shocked after all those headlines a while back about how old The Golden Girls actually were during filming (spoiler alert: they were in their 50s or 60s despite the fact they were supposed to be in their ‘golden’ late in life years, which we generally consider as 70-85). Rue McClanahan, who played spicy Blanche, was only FIFTY ONE when filming the show (I’m sorry if this throws you into an existential crisis also). Put it this way – The Golden Girls were the same age as Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda in the Sex and the City reboot.
Noooooot quite the same vibe, is it?!
Another terrifying one is Cheers – the core cast were all only in their early to mid THIRTIES on that show (except for Woody Harrelson who was only 21). Carla was only 34. Diane was only 33 (if these names mean nothing to you, these women felt like they were in their 40s, 50s or beyond).
Somehow, I managed to pull myself together and go to my meeting. It was with Robyn Malcolm – yes, the Robyn Malcolm. She looked beautiful – her skin is great and radiant, but full of natural expression, she’s so calm and confident and happy in her skin and we talked (and cackled) all about life and love and sex. And then we talked about what we were doing on the weekend and she said she was having her 60th birthday party.
My brain nearly exploded.
Robyn Malcolm, the life of the party, this vivacious woman who is really hitting her strides, is older than the Golden Girls or Jessica Fletcher.
Just for your brain to comprehend!
I’ve written before about having a crisis around 40, because I suddenly realised I actually no longer have any idea what a 40-year-old woman looks like, so I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this revelation. It makes sense that I’d also struggle to pinpoint what a 50, 60 or 70-year-old woman really looks like in 2025.
Because my upbringing of sitcoms sure as hell didn’t get it right. It seemed that as soon as you were over 30, you were now playing an old shrew.
I’m rageful, but also grateful. Because really, how fantastically lucky we are to be in this era. Because instead of your Golden Girls, today our real 50-something women are Jennifer Lopez (she’s 55), Amy Poehler (53), Sofia Vergara (52) or Jennifer Garner (52) (BTW, how good would that sitcom line-up be?)
Julia Louis Dreyfus is 64. Sandra Bullock is 60. Laura Linney is 61. Laura even had her first baby at 49. All bets are goddam off! And can you NAME more confident women!?
Women in their fifties and beyond are getting to play the love interest in films (although not nearly enough in our opinion!). Renee Zellweger is about to turn 56 and her latest, massive blockbuster hit, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy sees her having a relationship with a man in his 20s on her quest for another shot at love.
One of the biggest films of 2022 was the romcom Return to Paradise starring a then-55-year-old Julia Roberts opposite George Clooney. And last year, one of the most watched (and talked about!) movies was The Idea of You, which somehow ruffled feathers because 40-year-old Anne Hathaway played a chic 40-year-old woman who is pursued by a 20-something boyband superstar.
Women are no longer just automatically dropped into a stereotypical box of how they should look or behave once they hit 40, 50, 60, 70 or beyond. Just look at Jane Fonda, who is 87 (the skin!?).
But, Clinical Psychologist Dr Cecilia Dintino says that whole concept of not being put in a box, and continuing to evolve, change and reinvent ourselves at 50 and beyond may feel like it comes from external pressures and expectations, but ultimately, it’s also very dependent on our willingness to open our arms to change.
“If we are experts at anything,” she says, “we need to be experts at change.”
Cecelia sees a lot of women in her practice who are in their 50s and it’s hardly surprising as it’s often a decade when we go through a lot of change. It’s often when we might go through a divorce, a serious illness, a job loss, the death of a loved one; it’s when we might have the needs of elderly parents increase, the relationship with our children change – and of course, it’s when most women go through menopause. However, multiple studies have shown that despite all that, women are at their most confident age yet.
There is so much living to be done – we just have to make sure we don’t let Hollywood or – perhaps more importantly – ourselves get in the way of our confidence.
Change is hard, but inevitable, and Cecelia says we must be open to it and ready to reinvent ourselves. It has to be an inside job – something that we work at. Whether that’s in relation to how we look, how we feel or to our relationships or our careers.
“I have so many clients who have climbed the corporate ladder only to face that proverbial ceiling,” she says. “And the ceiling forms a sort of mirror reflecting back on you, sitting and waiting. One of my clients told me her neck hurts from trying to see through to something new. Only then did she begin to realise: “Maybe it’s not up there; maybe it’s inside of me somewhere.”
Cecelia says that through her extensive research on women over 50, the biggest complaint she hears is invisibility. “It seems the disappearing act starts with the outside world,” she says. “We notice that we stop feeling the gaze of others. Things that we say go unheard, or are dismissed as irrelevant. Overall, our resonant vibe has dulled. But the real trouble starts when we go invisible to ourselves. Where we were once creating identities with a pictured life trajectory, we now stare at the empty canvas of our future.”
But, says Cecelia, we all possess the ability within us to move forward, to change and to dream up a new future, no matter what may have risen or blocked our way forward on our current path. She says the key can often be returning to your intuition – a special source of magic that lies within us, that we’ve often overruled with our reasoning or logic and relying on our minds to solve a problem.
“Intuition is the engine for the amazing trick of creating a persona within one’s mind,” she says. “We intuitively know who we are, what we want and what we need to do.”
Now we have so many more choices about how we want to look, how we want to feel, what we want to do, and who with.
For most of us, every decade we’ll find ourselves looking back and realising how young we really were 10 years earlier. I remember thinking how old I was feeling turning 30, and then at 40 I laughed at how young 30 is. I know I’ll laugh at 50 about how young 40 is. My great aunt who was still thriving (and rocking a red lip every day) laughed about how young 80 is.
There is so much living to be done – we just have to make sure we don’t let Hollywood or – perhaps more importantly – ourselves get in the way of our confidence.
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