Age gap in Hollywood
Hollywood’s leading men and ladies differ in age considerably — even (or especially) when they’re in love with each other.
Lynn Fisher collected a dataset of roughly 1,000 movie relationships — lovers, ex-lovers, unrequited lovers — with the age gaps between the love interests. A look at the numbers highlights Hollywood’d penchant to perpetuate and exaggerate the norm of hetero relationships, where the man is almost always older — on average, more than 10 years older — and sometimes MUCH older than their female partner.
Here’s a distribution of the 969 movie relationships*:
The yellowish dot, all alone up there, is the 52-year gap in the 1971 movie Harold and Maude, the biggest in the set. It’s also one of the minority of movies where the woman is older than the man.
Here’s the tally: in 83 percent of the cases, the men were older, and it’s 95 to 5 when the age gap is more than 10 years. There are two cases where women are more than 25 years older than their partner, compared with 53 for men.
The average age gap is 11.2 years when men are older, and 5.4 when the woman is (although the distribution is wider for men). The average age gap has stayed relatively constant since the 1930s, and shows no signs of changing.
Here’s how many movies have been made with an age gap of more than 10 years in the last decade:
And here’s the average age gap by year for all movies in the dataset:
Notice that for men, it’s above 10 years for every year in the last decade.
Interestingly, at least in this dataset, the average age for lovers was pretty high — 39 for men and 31 for women — and the average has been rising, especially for women.
The second largest age gap was in Venus, followed by A Quiet American in 2002, with 50 and 49-year gaps. Since 2010, the movie with the biggest age difference was Wild Target with Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt, with a 34-year gap. A more recent one was the Oscar-nominated Phantom Thread, about the relationship between a prissy male genius, Daniel Day-Lewis, and his loyal/obsessed protégé, Vicky Krieps. They’re 26 years apart.
The whole dataset is available on Github here and a website with more info about each movie here.
*The dataset also included 20 same-sex relationships, which were omitted for this analysis. It’s also limited to movies where the younger partner is 17 or older.
