Pregnant at 61 or a mother aged three: why do movies love age-blind casting?

In Kate Winslet’s Goodbye June, Timothy Spall, 68, plays the father of Toni Collette, who is 53 – and pregnant. But those liberties are nothing compared with North by Northwest, The Manchurian Candidate or Thanksgiving

To be able to enjoy Kate Winslet’s new Christmas movie, Goodbye June, you have to be able to do a couple of things. First, if you’ve ever suffered any form of bereavement, you may have to approach it slowly, since the film is explicitly about the death of a parent. But the other thing you need to do is not Google the age of any of the cast.

This is for good reason. The titular June is played by Dame Helen Mirren, and her husband is played by Timothy Spall. Fine actors and national treasures, the pair of them. However, Mirren is 80 years old, and Spall is 68. Again, this is fine. You have undoubtedly met couples with bigger age gaps than this, and in all probability they are perfectly happy together.