Stewart Granger, the charming matinee idol of the mid-20th century, once bemoaned the inconvenience of ageing into an older leading man rather than a craggy character actor. Boo hoo! I’m too handsome. I still have to play the suave shipping magnate rather than the dropsy-addled bar-room incontinent.
Anyway, fans of George Clooney have been throwing themselves from skyscrapers after learning he is no longer to take on romantic leads. “Look, I’m 63 years old. I’m not trying to compete with 25-year-old leading men,” he told CBS. “That’s not my job. I’m not doing romantic films any more.”
Mary Kate Carr, writing in the AV Club, pitched in with the inevitable “Say it isn’t so, George!” There was more good-natured rending of garments elsewhere in the George-aligned media. He’s 63. Don’t people of that age deserve love? Isn’t he still a big old ride? And so on.
It hardly needs to be said that the rules have always been different for women. Cary Grant (born 1904) played romantic leads through his 50s: opposite Grace Kelly (born 1929) in To Catch a Thief, opposite Sophia Loren (born 1934 and still with us) in Houseboat. Meanwhile Bette Davis (born 1908) was being shuffled towards grotesques, holy monsters and, ultimately, the retirement community that was television.
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Even then, however, male stars were not immortal. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo now occupies a sacred place in the canon, but it was indifferently reviewed on release and gathered only modest box-office takings. The director blamed the financial underperformance on audiences thinking James Stewart, then 49, too old to play the love interest for Kim Novak, 25 years his junior.
The rules are not the same for everyone. It is not just about the date on the actor’s birth certificate. A year later, Grant, born four years before Stewart, had no problems winning over audiences as he romanced Eva Marie Saint in Hitchcock’s smash North by Northwest.
Stewart had, by this stage, aged into stammering avuncularity. In a variation on Granger’s complaint, he had become a character actor with lead-actor visibility. Grant, in contrast, retained much of the sleek carapace he had honed in the 1930s. That currency wouldn’t retain value through the 1960s, but it allowed him liquidity late into middle age.
In short, the calculation Clooney has made requires application of complex differential formulae. Some actors lose that leading-man sheen in their 40s (though not often in the current buff century). Others give the impression that they could retain love-interest status into the next life.
Have we mentioned Tom Cruise yet? The most durable leading man in Hollywood history, now 62, will, in just two months, be back to scale buildings, incinerate speedboats and yell at Hayley Atwell in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Okay, he doesn’t do much kissing in the Mission: Impossible flicks. But he was, three years ago, still up for a romantic motorbike ride with Jennifer Connelly in Top Gun: Maverick.
Even Grant aged from crisp seducer to borderline roue. Cruise, like the immortal heroine of H Rider Haggard’s novel She, bathes himself in sacred flames to frustrate the feeble attack of successive millenniums (or something).
Clooney (whose Broadway debut, in Good Night, and Good Luck, this week broke a box-office record) has a less mysterious approach. Grey before his time, never a sprite like Cruise, the square-jawed star has, for several decades, been a “mature man” – even to people of his own generation.
This is, perhaps, why so many eyebrows have been raised at his withdrawal from the romancing game. We could, 25 years ago, believe him snuggling up to Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight. Nobody much winced at him doing the same to Julia Roberts in the more recent Ticket to Paradise. Can you still get away with it at 63? Well, maybe you can’t. But he can.
Now we encounter the real problem. Clooney looks to be retiring from a genre and a character type that barely exist any more. In the era of James Stewart, Cary Grant and Stewart Granger (real name James Stewart, incidentally), the leading man was, for almost every sort of picture, required to move in mutual love-interest harmony with his female lead. Most of Hitchcock’s great pictures from the 1950s are romances as well as thrillers: To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much. That convention has largely gone.
Meanwhile, the substantially budgeted romantic comedy and romantic drama have more or less vanished from the big screen. You get those things on Netflix and Prime Video, but the high-profile lovey-dovey roles from which Clooney is withdrawing scarcely exist any more. Recall the recent furore at Glen Powell not getting to share a kiss with Daisy Edgar-Jones at the end of last year’s Twisters. If the new puritans are doing that to the Gen Z and the millennial stars, then lord help George and his late-boomer cohort.
