While conceding that “the issue is of course still pertinent: in Hollywood, where are the roles for older women?”, Harden is adamant that the play has to be more than a whinge about wrinkles and thinning hair. “If you think about old Hollywood, Del Lago would have been doing her leading roles during her 20s and 30s and probably would have felt washed up in her late 40s,” she muses. Harden is 57 and performing, in Jonathan Kent’s Chichester festival theatre production, opposite her 35-year-old compatriot Brian J Smith. In the 1959 premiere, directed in New York by Elia Kazan, Del Lago was played by Geraldine Page, who was not yet 40 (and only a year older than Paul Newman, who partnered her as the much younger Chance). ‘In Hollywood, where are the roles for older women?’ … Marcia Gay Harden Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
