I was watching Vertigo, one of my favorite movies, the other day, and my girlfriend pointed out the difference between Jimmy Stewart (50, obviously so) and Kim Novak (25). It got me thinking about Hitchcock working with some stanby guys, and then trading in the young blondes who were the love interests every couple years. In his 4 collaborations with Cary Grant, his age vs. the female lead is 37/24, 42/31, 51/26, and 55/35.

It got me thinking about the famous OK Cupid report that demonstrated the opposing SMV lines for Men vs. Women (In short: Men keep going up, women keep going down). Then I thought about movies as a whole. Some, like the James Bond films, it's a matter of course (average 14.2 year difference), but I wanted to go deeper.

After all, Hitchcock had his fantasies, and Bond movies are made for male shitlords. I wanted to test my hypothesis that there was a 1:1 correlation with casting in movies and sexual nature as we know to be true. Desirable men get older, and desirable women stay the same age.

Probably not the best use of my time, but I made an Excel spreadsheet just for fun tracking the ages of the male and female leads in every Best Picture Oscar Winner since the Oscars began. I'll post the Excel file if someone can tell me how to do it anonymously.

Findings:

Average age of men: 36.24

Average age of women: 29.29

Some thoughts:

For a lot of male superstars, it seems like they came out of the box raging successes. However, for every DiCaprio, who exploded at 23 (although he did a shitload of TV early), there's guys like De Niro, Nicholson and Crowe, who were in some terrrrrible movies to start out with, and finally started getting good (or just get breaks) at 32-33, and then make their masterpieces later 30's and onwards. It takes time to get good at shit.

My Aunt is a huge Richard Gere fan ("he's just so attractive!"), and she mentioned her favorite Gere roles were in American Gigolo, Pretty Woman, Chicago and Nights in Rodanthe (which she admitted to being a sucker for just because he's hot). Those movies are all about 10 years apart. That's a 28 year run from 31-59 where he just got more attractive, probably peaking at 53 in 2002's Chicago. My girlfriend thinks Richard Gere is hot, and she's 27.

I didn't include 10 or so movies from the list because they were male-dominated casts. Movies like Bridge over the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia have zero female characters. Read into that what you will.

Edit: Here's the link to spreadsheet.