ANY OLD ACTORS

To people of my generation it's difficult to think of actors like Sir Ralph, Sir John or Sir Larry as anything other than "old". After all, he films that were around when I was young in which they were appearing showed us that they were old and coming to the end of long and glittering careers. We'd never seen them any other way than as old men and that's the image which fixed itself in our minds.

It didn't really matter to us that they'd had long an glittering careers, or that they might once have been as young and springy of step as our own generation of actors, they were just those old guys. We might have seen the odd photograph of them prancing about on stage back in the thirties, or mooning over some young starlet in the kinds of soppy-looking films we might catch our mums watching on damp Saturday afternoons, but we seldom made the connection between those bright young things and the ancient monuments with which we were familiar, and, even if we did, it was only to remark upon how silly they used to look, or to be overcome with the kind of "I don't believe it!" incredulity of youth that now appears to have found a massive new outlet in TwitWorld...

Our generation had proper action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis, not old geezers like them or those cowboys in the films that dad used watch. Young looking, vital, hard guys, dispensing violence with a merry quip on their lips and not being above jumping from a building or two with naught but an aesthetically positioned scratch to show for it.

"Young guys like Stallone and Schwarzenegger...?" I hear you youngsters at the back giggling...

Well, yes they were, then...

"How could he ever have been James Bond...? He's just so old...!"

Sorry Sean... Sorry Rog...

Just as Larry and Johnnie and Ralphie were in my parent's day...

Equally, our "contemporaries", the actors that were our own age, such as George Clooney and Brad Pitt, well, they were all being swooned over and fantasised about by people who didn't think that the likes of us mere mortals were good enough for them, and it's rather hard to think of them as getting old just like everyone else does.

I'm sure that teenagers nowadays whisper to each other about the crushes that their parents have on the Clooney and the Pitt and find it all rather gross and disgusting... if they're feeling up to a three syllable reaction, that is...

I suppose that we are old enough and lucky enough to have seen Harrison and Clint and Sean and Rog when they were young and fresh and in their prime, but it's easy to understand, really, how people's visions of just who the Movie Stars are change from generation to generation. After all, the actors that are already in the world when we arrive into it are already oldish and getting older by the day, the ones which arrive on the world stage when we're teenagers are just that little bit older than us, and the ones who are our own age when they achieve their success seem like young and talentless young whippersnappers to our mums and dads when compared to their own idea of what a living legend might be.

The other thing is that when my generation was growing up, our access to older performances was pretty much restricted to whatever happened to be on one of the three choices of TV channel we had. Our only exposure to Ralph and Larry and John was in the movies that they were making at the time, and it was a very rare thing for anything showing them off as youngsters to be shown on telly, unless they dredged up "Henry V" for some strangely patriotic or Bank Holiday related reason.

Perhap future generations will be luckier given that they have far wider access to old movies and performances than we once did and the youthful versions of their heroes and heroines will remain on constant rerun, whilst the respected real person is hopefully allowed to mellow nicely whilst retaining all of the respect and adoration... until the next generation grow up and declare them to be whatever their equivalent of "gross" might happen to be.

This is one of the reasons that these relatively new theatre initiatives like N.T. Live and its stablemates at the R.S.C. and the Opera remain so vital so that, unlike in previous eras, we will be able to preserve these great performances for future generations to enjoy and learn from, even when the fan-girls and squeeeee-merchants of today have got to the age where they can say things like "I remember when David Tennant were nowt but a nipper" and so forth.

Because, believe it or not, that day will come... and perhaps sooner than you think...