The 2025 Golden Globes Were Proof That Women Over 45 Are Finally Having Their Moment
Tinsel Town has historically been a hostile place for women, but at last night’s Golden Globes, it appeared that the era of experienced female actors being snubbed may well be coming to a long, overdue close.
Forget girl power though, it was fully-fledged woman power that was on display at last night’s ceremony, after a stable of mononymous stars — Demi! Pamela! Zoe! — proved that women, particularly those over the age of 45, are at long last receiving recognition for their work.
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Take 62-year-old Demi Moore, for example, who won Best Actress for playing the titular role in Coralie Fargeat’s body horror film The Substance and mentioned in her acceptance speech how she’d resigned herself to not being taken seriously as an actor. ‘I really wasn’t expecting that. I’m just in shock right now! I’ve been doing this a long time, like over 45 years and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor. And I’m just so humbled and so grateful,’ the Ghost star said.
Moore – whose daughters Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah, were seen jumping for joy as they reacted to her win – revealed how she was once described as a ‘popcorn actress’ by a producer. ‘I felt this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have, that I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged,’ she said. ‘And I bought in, and I believed that, and that corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it, maybe I was complete, maybe I've done what I was supposed to do.’
Then, she remarked, the script for The Substance — ironically a film about an aging Hollywood star who embraces a secret cloning procedure to salvage her career — landed on her desk, and the rest is history.
It wasn’t just Moore’s triumph that suggested a shift for female actors. 46-year-old Zoe Saldaña cried tears of joy upon winning her first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture during the 82nd ceremony. 'This is a first time for me,' the Emilia Pérez actor said, before shouting out her fellow cast members and nominees, calling herself 'blessed to be sharing this moment.'
59-year-old actor Fernanda Torres was also celebrated for her work, becoming the first Brazilian female actor to win the award for Best Actress in a Drama for I’m Still Here. Her victory was one of the evening’s many notable moments for women, with Torres looking shocked at hearing her name called by presenter Viola Davis.
Despite female-helmed films defining the zeitgeist in recent years, women’s work has been almost consistently disregarded by those who hold the power in Hollywood. Despite the undeniable commercial success of films with female leads in 2023, a study found that of 2023’s top 100 films only 30 featured a female lead or co-lead, marking the worst result since 2014. ‘This is a catastrophic step back for girls and women in film,’ research head Dr. Stacy L Smith said in a statement that accompanied the study. ‘In the last 14 years, we have charted progress in the industry, so to see this reversal is both startling and in direct contrast to all of the talk of 2023 as the “year of the woman”.’
While progress for women as a whole, let alone 'women of a certain age', is incremental, the ultimate hope is for us to achieve the level of equality that will render our age irrelevant. The same way that when men win awards, the news of their successes are rarely accompanied by their age, the hope is that women of all ages succeeding can be the rule, rather than the exception.
Moore ended her speech by saying, ‘I'll just leave you with one thing, that I think this movie is imparting, 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”.’
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