There’s something to be said for longevity, and there are plenty of actors who have done outstanding recent work in addition to monumental work going back to the 1970s. Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman and other living legends are still putting in excellent work, but it’s hard to compete with the game-changing stuff they did decades ago (Meryl might be the exception in how consistently good she has always been and probably always will be). Jack Nicholson, however, despite delivering iconic characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Easy Rider, Chinatown, and The Shining, arguably puts in his best work at age 65 in About Schmidt, not to mention the performance four years later in The Departed. If nothing else, his voice seems far more suited to that of an older man, gruff and grizzled, than it did in his younger days.
Then again, it might just come down to his face, or also in Nicholson’s case, the effect age has had on the body. No one seems to portray senior physicality quite like Alexander Payne, which is one reason Bruce Dern is up for so many awards, as Nicholson was back in 2002. With acting, there seems to be a similar conundrum to the one faced by athletes or similar professionals. When the body is at its peak, the mind is still figuring things out. Once the mind starts to get the hang of things, the body starts to slip. The benefit of playing characters on a fictional story is that the physical limitations can be worked around, and you can still see Robert Redford manning a boat in All is Lost at age 77.
It’s understandable for audiences to want to see their world reflected back to them on the movie screen, and the fact that blockbusters are geared toward younger viewers with their youthfully skewed casts makes sense. For the most deeply affecting dramatic or even comedic work, though, it’s usually a good bet to go with the actor who’s been around the block a few times.
