Barbara Stanwyck’s Grey Hair

Abstract

Unlike many Hollywood stars of her generation, Barbara Stanwyck extended and diversified her film career during the 1950s by starring in numerous B-series westerns, where her dominant image of independent, tough woman, questioned the limits of gender and genre. Postwar Hollywood production system has changed and veteran film stars were less in demand. This paper aims to investigate the role of Barbara Stanwick as "mature women’s role model". If it is true that her maturity, emphasized by premature gray hair and the refusal to dye them, influenced her roles and transformed her into a model for mature women, aging certainly not helped fostering her film career. As the scholar Susan Hayward states, "aging is too real - not the “real we want to see" (1996, p. 340). Moreover, Stanwyck’s fascination with the western genre is consistent with his image as a mature woman with Republican tendencies. In 1973, she was the first woman to be included in the "Hall of Fame of Great Western Performers" at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

Keywords

• hollywood stardom
• gender and ageing
• emotional acting
• models of womanhood
• glamourizing ageing