Foraging past 40

Of all the birthdays you have allocated during your time on earth, your fortieth will most likely be the one you look least forward to.

If you temporarily set aside the miracle of still being alive, forty brings with it nothing that you want other than the bells and whistles of a milestone birthday. With lines on your face creeping up to stamp the march of time, and hair morphing into a (literally) paler imitation of its former lustrous self, forty signals the loss of almost everything you took for granted: youth, hair, collagen, and metabolism you would kill to get back.

When roles begin to vanish

All of this, of course, is terrible news on its own, but it is almost a death sentence when you are both a woman and an actor. Unless you are an athlete or a supermodel, no other profession – doctor, dentist, teacher, banker – will cast you aside like a used tissue as soon as you hit that ghastly, embarrassing milestone birthday. In a newsflash that will surprise absolutely nobody, the bells begin to toll the moment you have accrued any amount of experience – as both Javeria Saud and Faiza Hasan can testify.

"A lot of actors who are above 50 don't want to work with us," observes Faiza on a local chat show as she mulls over the demographic of the Pakistani entertainment industry with fellow actor Javeria. "It makes them feel younger. Also, they aren't intimidated by someone who is younger than them."

A quick study of recent dramas makes it clear that Faiza is not wrong. Think of any older female actor – Bushra Ansari (Kabhi Main Kabhi Tum), Saba Hameed (Noor Jahan), or Nadia Afgan (Suno Chanda), for example – and the chances are that she will be out there playing someone's mother. By contrast, Humayun Saeed – aged 54, five years older than Nadia when she played a mother to adult children in Suno Chanda 2 in 2019 – got to play a gangster unbothered by family ties in Gentleman last year.

Shoeboxed and typecast

The problem is not that Humayun gets to play a gangster and these women play mothers; the problem is that a mother is all they are expected to play. Of course, it would be senseless to expect a twentysomething actor to get into the mind of a vicious mother-in-law with the aplomb Saba Hameed pulled off in Noor Jahan. But whether Saba and her ilk are given characters with their own stories (like Humayun's gangster) is what is under question here – although perhaps it should not come as such a shock that they are limited to mothers. All of these women occupy a patriarchal cultural fabric where motherhood is glorified to the cost of pursuing any semblance of life outside the home. Every tired mother wanting to vent will have been informed by a nearby man that she should suck it up because heaven lies beneath her feet.

Ergo, the subtext cannot be plainer: older women who have dedicated a lifetime in service to motherhood have no interesting stories of their own. (Where would they get the time?) And if they did manage to accrue any interesting stories, no one cares. Sania Saeed, 52, drove home this very point in an appearance on Mohib Mirza's chat show last year. "It's now that I have begun to understand work, and now they say, your story is not important," she had lamented at the time. "I really want to say that my age bracket has the most stories to tell."

Women in that age bracket may have meatier stories to tell, but as Faiza so astutely observed, it is difficult to find male actors willing to play a leading role opposite a woman their own age. Having said that, we should not be too hasty to pour all blame upon male actors. In the same chat show as Faiza, Javeria has an interesting point about internalised misogyny to share.

"I am not going to take any names, but a lot of showbiz heroines who are the same age as us want their husbands to be seen with a younger woman," remarks Javeria, beefing up Faiza's observation about older men.

Javeria's observation of these traitorous women harks back to a point Sania made on Mohib's chat show last year. "This is reflective of how your society views women generally in life as well," Sania declared. "After 40, they say these women are irrelevant, and what's there to say about them?"

The one actor who has appeared to escape the dreaded spectre of forty is Pakistan's quintessential heroine Mahira Khan. The only person who truly disputes Mahira's heroine status is Firdous Jamal, who rarely misses an opportunity in interviews to declare her overrated and past her prime. Despite Firdous's strictures, however, Mahira appears to have lost neither her youthful glow nor her tendency to nab roles that matter. She will next be seen in Pakistan's first Netflix show Jo Bachain Hain Sang Samait Lo. Will she be relegated to playing a nondescript mother? At this point, we cannot say. All we know is that Mahira occupies that rarefied air where she is free from the danger of playing a nondescript anything. She is the exception that proves the rule.

Older women in Hollywood

Outside Pakistan, Hollywood can boast a few more exceptions that prove the rule. Last year, we saw Cate Blanchett steal the show in Disclaimer, Demi Moore in The Substance, and Zoe Saldaña in Emilia Pérez, proving that the tide has begun to change for older women.

Moore – ironically starring in a film about an ageing celebrity who goes to horrific lengths to cling to her fleeting youth – is more astonished than anyone to be included on this list. Having honed her reputation as the '90s 'It' girl known largely for her pottery skills in Ghost, Moore, 62, revealed in her Golden Globes acceptance speech that she had once been informed by a well-meaning was a 'popcorn actress' – in other words, that she could forget about roles of any substance. (Pun unintended). Saldaña had a similarly cautionary tale.

"I'm 46," Saldaña said backstage at the awards show. "There was a moment a couple of years ago, where I was sort of thinking about plan Bs. Do I go into a homestead and start planning a garden and baking goods and just become, you know, the sexiest soccer mom, in my mind?"

As any green-fingered baker will be at pains to stress, there is a degree of skill involved in knowing how to not kill plants and whip up a tray of cookies on the spot. However, Saldaña was able to sidestep being relegated to just the garden and the kitchen and, as of last week, is also in the running for a BAFTA award.

Can Pakistani women actors past "a certain age" (that all-pervading euphemism for the unmentionable 40) ever hope for the opportunities that eventually befell Moore and Saldaña? As long as the actors that Faiza and Javeria have warned us about still exist – probably not.