The Third Act

There’s a new wave of women hitting their stride in midlife, proving it’s never too late to be great.

- Meg Mason

I DIDN’T ACTUALLY MEAN it when I told a friend, just before I turned 40, that I was going to make a vision board that was entirely pictures of Sharon Horgan. As funny and clever and always enviably dressed as the actor and creator of the television show Catastrophe is, devoting so much wall to one person could seem like a tiny red flag vis-a-vis my mental state as I slid into midlife.

But whenever I see Horgan on Instagram, on the cover of a weekend magazine or wearing a lime-green chinoiserie one-piece with tulle socks and spike heels on the red carpet, I do let myself be reminded of this: although she spent her twenties and thirties trying to establish herself as an actor, success only came for her at 45. Now aged 48, she’s considered one of the most powerful women in television.

As a woman who hit her professional stride in midlife, Horgan isn’t the only candidate vying for pride of place on our collective vision boards. In fashion, literature, the arts, business, and politics, women over 40 – sometimes well over – are proving there’s no age cut-off for success. That after a first or second career, after motherhood or divorce, redundancy, caregiving, bereavement, whatever defines the first two decades of our adult life, there can certainly be the third act.

Cut out and pin up Nancy Pelosi, who is the speaker of the US House of Representatives, a devoted Donald Trump baiter and 79 years old. Or Daphne Selfe, a model better recognized at 90 than she was in her twenties, or the ballerina Alessandra Ferri who danced in the opening performance at Covent Garden last year when she was 55, a good quarter-century past a dancer’s typical retirement age.