Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Courteney Cox admits she has done things she 'regrets' to look younger

'Getting older is not the easiest things but I have learned lessons,' Friends star says

Wednesday 24 August 2016 10:20 BST

Women in the public eye are trapped in a catch-22 situation.

After taking measures to preserve their youth in a bid to combat rampant Hollywood ageism, they then find themselves shamed in ‘What has happened to [insert name]’s face?’ headlines.

Courteney Cox, best known for playing the hyper-organised, feisty and mothering character Monica Geller in Friends, has described her regret at succumbing to ageism and the effect of that scrutiny.

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Show all 12

1/12The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

EPA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

Getty Images

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

EPA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

PA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

Getty Images

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

Gareth Cattermole/Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

Getty Images

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

While trekking through the hills of rainy Ireland for Running Wild with Bear Grylls, Cox told the adventurer she has now adopted an approach of simply letting nature take its course after a constant battle against ageing led her making decisions about her appearance which she later regretted. The 51-year-old has often found herself the source of speculation as to what procedures she may have had and has previously spoken about getting botox.

Courteney Cox – Filmography | PrettyFamous

“I think there’s a pressure, not necessarily because of fame, but just being a woman in this business,” she said. “Getting older is not the easiest thing but I have learned lessons.

“I think I was trying to keep up with getting older and trying to chase that and it’s something you can’t keep up […] because sometimes you find yourself trying and you look at a picture of yourself and go ‘Oh god, I look horrible’.”

“I have done things that I regret and luckily there are things that dissolve and go away and that’s good because it’s not always been my best look so now I just have a new motto just: ‘Let it be’.”

Cox joins a number of women speaking out about the unrealistic and unfair standards placed on women in the public eye. Her good friend and former Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston penned an essay calling out the historic speculation over her body and fertility.

“I am not pregnant. I’m fed up with the sport-like scrutiny and body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of ‘journalism’," she wrote.

Similarly, another woman whose face has long been the fascination of tabloids, Renee Zellwegger, wrote a scathing response to the speculation over whether she has had cosmetic surgery.

“The ‘eye surgery’ tabloid story did not matter, but it became the catalyst for my inclusion in subsequent legitimate news stories about self-acceptance and women succumbing to social pressures to look and age a certain way,” she wrote.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies