60 is the new normal: Jack Nicholson and the very human art of moving the goalposts
“Our generation are the new old. I remember what someone of 60 looked like when I was a kid. They didn’t look like me.”
— Jack Nicholson, in 1998
Aging bites, and we all look at it — and ourselves, in the mirror and otherwise — differently as the years pass.
The actor Jack Nicholson made this comment to the Telegraph of London in 1998, a year after he turned 60, and not long after he appeared in his Oscar-winning role as a grouchy, neurotic novelist in As Good As It Gets.
Nicholson has a point about men of a certain age looking much, much older in the past. Women, too: three of the Golden Girls characters were supposedly in their 50s when the series started, a note that astonishes fans to this day. Ed Asner was just 40 when he started playing Lou Grant to Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards; she was just three years younger than the actor who played her office dad.
Life expectancy may be a factor. When Nicholson was trying to break in as a young actor (he appeared in some schlock, like the non-musical Little Shop of Horrors, before finally breaking in 1969’s Easy Rider), the average American man’s life expectancy from birth was just 67. In Nicholson’s youth, people who hit 60 often dressed the part.
Ditto for men of earlier ages, and it reflected in the pop culture of the era. Hugh Beaumont, who played the cardigan-and-tie-wearing dad on Leave It to Beaver, was 47 when the show started, and dressed more like a grandpa. Consider Jason Segal, who plays the dad on Shrinking, who’s currently 46, and dresses like he’s not long off campus.
I write this post as someone who turned 60 last year. I’m getting used to it, and I didn’t blink recently when — while getting a swimming pass — the clerk said I “obviously” am entitled to the seniors’ discount. I asked what the necessary age was. “Oh, 65, of course.”
Ouch.
Or maybe we’re all just, as Nicholson suggested, getting used to new standards of appearance.
Nicholson, of course, continues to age, as we all do. He’s now 89; next year, he will be 90. I hope the world will all raise their eyebrows, and glasses, to him.