How 10 Actors Who Played Elderly Characters Really Grow Old

Actors often have to play roles that are not appropriate for their age. To look younger, makeup artists may be inspired by old photographs at a younger age; but aging them is another story. In these cases, the characterization is based on how they might age, and it may not be how they age later in real life, as this process depends on many factors.

10 PHOTOS

1. Despite how well preserved and handsome he is, the actor is already under sixty. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, you can see the journey through the life of a character who ages backward. By the end of the film, he is a baby. In the image on the left, we can see how Pitt was aged in the movie to roughly represent his current age.

2. When Christopher Lloyd started playing the sort of Doc Brown for the Back to the Future saga, the actor was in his forties, and his character was a seventy-year-old scientist with a few fun ideas. And to this day, almost 4 decades later and at the age of more than 80 years, the actor really looks like he used to get used to the shoes of this character.

3. When Coming to America came out, thirty-year-old Eddie Murphy surprised us by playing several roles with different facial features and ages. One of them was a hairdresser who, although we do not know his exact age, looked quite old. However, we can tell that now in his sixties, Murphy, who still makes us laugh, is far from the old version we were shown in the movie.

4. Aside from her extravagant hairstyle, the aging that the Back to the Future 2 makeup team did for Elisabeth Shue was top-notch. At the time, the actress was in her twenties and the purpose of this makeup was to make her look 50. But now the actress is in her fifties and we can see that she looks exactly like she was described over 30 years ago.

5. When Ian McKellen first played Magneto, he was in his sixties, but the production needed both him and Patrick Stewart as Professor Charles Xavier to look even more "mature." If you look closely at the images of that time and compare them with today, 2 decades later, it seems that both actors over the past 20 years have been preserved as they look in the film.

6. At 23, Lea Thompson looked 40 while interpreting a futuristic version of Back to the Future 2's protagonist's mother. To give her that look, the makeup sessions lasted over 3 hours. Today, the actress is sixty, and she looks much better than even at a younger age 3 decades ago.

7. It should be noted that this role, unlike all the others, is based on real events, therefore, in the characterization, they tried to make the actor look like the person he played. In addition, their age at the time of filming was not so different, although it is undeniable that the actor has survived much better than the politician. Currently, Daniel Day-Lewis has even surpassed his character's age.

8. All 6 characters played by Hugh Grant in this film are villains or people who have no good intentions. One of them is a hotel worker whose name is unknown, and at first glance, we can estimate his age from fifty-something to sixty-something, just like Hugh Grant is currently in real life.

9. In this film, Embeth Davidtz plays dual roles, grandmother and granddaughter, developing a generational leap, which means she gets a lot of screen time, and the ability to "live" over the 2 centuries in which the story takes place. Throughout the film, we can see her aging, even a very old woman on the verge of death. In these two images that we have chosen, their age will be approximately the same.

10. When this film was made, in which Crispin Glover played the role of a family man in his fifties, he was actually in his early twenties. The most curious thing is that he played the father of the protagonist, who was even younger than him, or rather, almost 3 years. Glover was born in April 1964 and his fictional son Michael J. Fox was born in June 1961.