Bridget Fonda and me: facing up to opting out
Two female celebrities featured in the news last week, one of whom conformed entirely to type, and the other one very much did not. The former was Jane Seymour, who was the cover interview of last weekend’s Saturday Times magazine.
Seymour has always been — famously — a beautiful woman. Of course she has, she’s a celebrity, and while celebrities aren’t actually required to possess more abilities than the average person (in fact, some seem to possess significantly fewer), the one thing demanded of them is that they are lovely to look at. That is their superpower: that they look better than us. So even though Seymour is now 72, and claims to have had relatively little (for a celebrity) plastic surgery — “My eyes were done when I was 40, the same time I had my boobs done” — she still has a jawline you could slice bread on and she claims to be the same weight as when she was 17.
The journalist Andrew Billen asked if she used Botox, a toxin injected into the face to reduce wrinkles and which, in the world of beauty treatments, is about as basic as a blow dry. “As an actress I don’t think it works . . . It’s useful to have the muscles working,” Seymour replied.
Jane Seymour claims to have had relatively little (for a celebrity) plastic surgery
This is the standard celebrity line about Botox. Celebrities have access to the best plastic surgeons, dieticians and private trainers in the world, but it is not enough for them to be beautiful — their beauty must be near effortless, because that confirms their specialness, and explains why they deserve the worship of us, the ugly peasants. So Seymour’s special power is, as Billen puts it, “her astonishingly consistent appearance”.
Which brings me to Bridget Fonda and her inconsistent appearance. Fonda joined the family business as a child and by the 1990s, when she was in her twenties and thirties, she was a star. In the early 2000s she quit acting to raise her family, and recently — thanks to various gossip websites — it has transpired she has done something even more shocking than that: Fonda, 59, no longer looks like a celebrity.
Last week she was ambushed by paparazzi at an airport, alongside her teenage son, looking like a middle-aged mum — like me, in other words. And this became international news. Fonda is “nearly unrecognisable”, headlines screamed, all running photos of Fonda today in her loose top and trousers next to ones of her lounging, sultry and skinny, in a bikini from Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, Jackie Brown. These days, one tabloid gasped, Fonda “appeared to go make-up-free”.
The spectacle of a celebrity who stops looking like a celebrity — fails to fulfil their part of the bargain, in other words — is always a bit of a shock. Even more than a celebrity who’s gone too far with the plastic surgery, because that seems understandable. And it’s not just female celebrities. Jack Nicholson also got the treatment last week, when photos appeared of him on his balcony looking like a rumpled 85-year-old, which is exactly what he is.
Ageing is unforgivable in a celebrity but putting on weight is even worse, judging from the cackling in recent years over photos of Pete Doherty and Alex James, looking heavier than they did 20 years ago. Obviously, this is all hideously ageist and fatphobic and stupid and shallow. And yet, whenever these kinds of stories arise, I reach for my phone like a crack addict for the pipe and text my friends: “Oh my God, have you seen?!”These otherwise intelligent, liberal-minded, non-judgmental friends text back: “Bloody hell! What happened???” Given all the weapons celebrities have at their disposal to fight against their own bodies — from oxygenated facials to Ozempic — to opt out seems like a perverse and deliberate choice. Right?
While Fonda and Nicholson were being shamed for experiencing the passing of time, I witnessed my own life passing before my eyes — or, to be more precise, across my face. I was interviewed on TV last week, a medium I usually avoid because Sitting Woman Behind Keyboard is my favourite yoga position and Grinning Woman in Front of Camera is very much my least. Nonetheless, I did it, watched it afterwards, and — good God, who is that heavily lined, weirdly rubbery faced hag?
Sure, there are (some) older women on TV. But what are euphemistically known as “tweakments” — Botox and other non-surgical interventions — are so common it’s genuinely startling to see on screen a face with un-ironed wrinkles, which screws up into unflattering expressions and shows all the blemishes of time. A face like mine, in other words.
The eye adjusts to the new normal, and people adapt accordingly. Many of my friends have had tweakments, and none of them are celebrities. “Have you thought about getting your eyebrows microbladed?” a make-up artist asked me on Thursday while she made me presentable to appear on radio, because apparently you need make-up even just to sit behind a microphone. I am no stranger to vanity, but I’d never thought about getting any part of me microbladed, filled, Botoxed or so on, because I never saw my face as my ultimate selling point, and also because I barely have time to get my hair cut these days, let alone make an appointment to freeze my forehead. I hadn’t realised that just by living exactly as I’d always done, I was opting out. But I guess I was.
As Fonda and her son were pursued through the airport, clearly wishing to be left alone, a paparazzo asked if there was any chance she might opt back in and return to Hollywood. “I don’t think so,” she replied. “It’s too nice being a civilian.” Well, most of the time, Bridget.