Helen Mirren in red bikini at 62

After the photographs of the gorgeous Helen Mirren in red bikini were published by Britain's Daily Mail newspaper last week, they appeared extensively on Internet and newspapers worldwide. Helen Mirren’s bikini photos caused a sensation and jaws dropped in awe. Some even doubted them to be some digital mischief but the doubts were short-lived and her body appeared to be the result of old fashioned exercise, and the good care she took of her health and well being. Readers posted quite a lot of admiration comments and some envied her looks.

Some reporters wrote the snaps of the Oscar-winning actress frolicking on rocks with her husband in Italy evoke memories of Ursula Andress, the Swiss star who played the part of Honey Rider in the James Bond film Dr No, and Brigitte Bardot, the popular '60s actress from Paris, in their heydays.
No doubt, Helen Mirren looked much younger in her two-piece bikini than most women decades younger than her. A woman wrote, "Yes, she does look great but she has never had children! Do not make us mothers feel bad, also it is her job to look good! I do admire her but this is also a very blurry shot ...”

Actress Joan Collins, no slouch herself at 75, was moved enough by the public's palpable surprise in finding a woman in her 60s truly sexy that she wrote a newspaper article about it. "Everyone seemed rather amazed that she was looking so good just days short of her 63rd birthday," Collins said last week. "Yet there are flocks of women in their 50s, 60s and 70s who still look sexy and absolutely wonderful whether in or out of a swimsuit. I certainly applaud Dame Helen for wearing a bikini on which she obviously thought was an extremely secluded stretch of beach."

The photographs were taken in Puglia, on the southern tip of Italy, where Mirren and her American film-director husband Taylor Hackford, 63, own a 500-year-old castle. It is reported Helen Mirren bought the property to celebrate her Best Actress Oscar win for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II. (The English stage, film and television actress has won an Oscar, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes and four Emmy Awards during her career.)

In today’s fast-phased life when young women are tormented by lack of confidence, endless anxieties concerning their perceived physical inadequacies and self-harming in a variety of different ways, from going under the scalpel of the cosmetic surgeon to starving themselves with binge eating, it seems, they may not look so good at Mirren’s age.

Middle-aged women don’t are not better off either, desperately trying to keep up with their twenty-something counterparts. Women’s interest in looking good is still not a subject that is taken seriously. Addicted to lipstick, or to making sure that you look nice on the beach, are admitting you are unforgivably shallow. Men snigger derisively and so-called serious women are scornful of such supposedly lightweight interests.

The trick was always turning towards yourself without turning away from men and the older these women are; the better they have managed it, not just in films but in real life, too. Here is something that researchers say, every survey tells us that older women have better, more satisfying sex than their daughters; have more disposable income; are freer; laugh more; have nicer possessions and are better dressed.

What has worked isn’t necessarily increasing politicization, or that many of these women are the right age to have been at the vanguard of the feminist movement. Rather, it is the thrilling combination of age and health, or as Nora Ephron once said, the life-changing power of hair dye.

It is an intractable fact that how we look is tied up with how we feel and that advances over the past 20 years or so mean that we now have the opportunity to defy age and, with it, to defy all the clichés concerning age-appropriate behavior and pastimes. The fact that a 50+ woman doesn’t have to have a turkey neck or great big jowls if she doesn’t want them is as revolutionary as, for example, being paid properly for maternity leave.

Here is a list of women looking still gorgeous:

Sophia Loren, 73 (September 20, 1934)
Jane Fonda, 70 (December 21, 1937)
Julie Christie, 67 (April 14, 1941)
Catherine Deneuve, 64 (October 22, 1943)
Dolly Parton, 62 (January 19, 1946)
Helen Mirren, 62 (July 26, 1945)
Goldie Hawn, 62 (November 21, 1945)
Glenn Close, 61 (March 19, 1947)
Meryl Streep, 59 (June 22, 1949)
Brigitte Bardot, 73 (September 28, 1934)
Glenda Jackson, 72 (May 9, 1936)

And women still young:

Michelle Pfeiffer, 50 (April 29, 1958)
Madonna, 49 (August 16, 1958)