I’ve always had a strong sense of resilience and have been pretty good about not letting fear take hold of me. My friends and I often remark that good things happen when we take chances on ourselves. Sometimes I look back on choices I made early on in my career and think, Wow, that was bold.
Still, not everything made sense as it was happening. Every woman I know has a winding road from where she started out to where she ended up. This is mine.
After giving up on early teen dreams of acting, I started my fashion career at 19, working with my costume-designer mother as a wardrobe assistant for film and TV. Then I got a styling job at a department store called Grace Bros, trying to make boring bits of apparel look good.
That job also led to offers to work at a magazine called Follow Me, which was in the realm of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. I became the fashion editor’s assistant. About a year into that, there was talk of me becoming fashion editor of a junior magazine called Hero.
I was working there when a friend of mine called me up and said, “Oh, will you do this acting workshop this weekend? Just do it as a favour?” I said, “No. I’m not acting any more. I quit.” Then he pleaded: “We are really short on women. The ratio’s off, and it’s just a weekend! Please!”
My boyfriend was away at the time. Eventually, I thought, OK, yeah, fine. I’ll just do it. And by the end of the weekend, both the teacher and all the other fellow actors had said, “You’re living a lie. This is your dream, it’s so obvious. You’re so good at it. You’ve got to get back in the game.”
This was a meaningful weekend. I did think, Maybe they’re right? It sure was fun. Then on Monday morning, I went to my boss and said, “I’m leaving because I want to be an actor.” And he said, “Ha. You can still be an actor on the weekends. Don’t quit, though. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re at the beginning of your career, you’ve got a fantastic job, a great salary. You’re on the road somewhere. Don’t throw it all away.”
“No, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m serious. I’ll stay for another month. I’ll train someone, but this is what I want to do.” He looked at me like I was insane. And then a handful of weeks later, I went to a casting for the movie Flirting and got the job. So that was that.
And I started working as an actor. But I wonder where I’d be now if I hadn’t said yes to that friend. The takeaway here for me is that, as they say, it’s better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than halfway up one you don’t.
Relocating to America was also a very bold move. I had $2,000 to my name and one phone number belonging to a friend of my mother’s. And I was friendly but not yet besties with Nicole Kidman. We’d worked together on Flirting, and we knew each other peripherally from back home in Australia. We became much better acquainted once I moved here. And over time I made more friends and built a community.
The point is: I was brave back then. So I can be brave now when it comes to taking risks in life. We took chances when we were younger, and didn’t we know so much less back then? Midlife is a good time to bet on ourselves again.
Lately I see women all around me looking back on their careers and asking questions about what it all means and what’s next.
When I’ve spoken to women about what it’s like to be working as a menopausal woman, I’ve heard responses all over the map. Some are thriving. They’ve been in the business long enough to know their value and their power while still being young enough to have the energy to keep charging ahead.
“In midlife, men buy motorcycles or fast cars and women get PhDs,” my friend Mariella Frostrup told me when I called her for her take. “A lot of men seem to slightly slow down at this age and they’re looking toward retirement and taking up golf. And women just seem to become so much more driven and ambitious and focused as our oxytocin goes down, and we lose that love for toddlers, and our children leave home.
“And that’s an opportunity. As men slow down and head to the golf course, here we are ready to take over!”
I have several friends who were so liberated by the empty nest. They suddenly had way more energy to focus on their work and hit their prime career years when their kids were in college or later. It’s a real phenomenon and we should talk about it more, rather than just focusing on how much we miss our kids when they leave home (even if that’s true, too!).
My friend Sophie recently told me, “The mothers among us will never stop worrying about or caring for our kids, but the child-rearing years of ‘mother guilt’ should be finally set aside.
“The best middle-aged mother now must surely be the one who attempts to let go – trusts in her children, after the primary job has been done. She has earned the confidence to advise on what is yet to be navigated, and hopefully with a sense of humour.”
So many women I know had flourishing careers until they became mothers and wound up struggling to keep everything balanced.
“That whole joke about having it all actually wears a bit thin,” Mariella told me, “when you look at the economic impact of motherhood on women. Within 12 years of having your first child, you’re likely to be earning 33% less than a male contemporary who was doing the same thing at the point you had the child.
“By the time you get to your pension at the end of your working life, it’s going to be somewhere between 15% and 40% less again than that of a male contemporary.”
Of course, a lot of women step out of the workplace for caregiving, for children, or for ageing parents. That can put us in a terrible bind when we return to work, especially if we’re having overwhelming menopause symptoms. Surrounded by younger people coming up behind us, we can struggle with confidence.
Working with people whose values you share makes everything so much easier. I believe that film is ultimately a director’s medium, so I’ve always done my best to find directors I trust and to put myself in their capable hands. Of course, it’s a collaborative experience, but the director is the main storyteller. As an actor, you have to give yourself over to their point of view as much as possible.
You don’t always have that luxury when the A-list directors stop calling – which has been my experience for years at a time. Maybe that’s because I’ve had a few bombs along the way. More than a handful!
The fact is, it’s rare and extremely difficult to make a film or TV show that works on all levels. Mostly they fail. And when you’ve been working in the industry as long as I have, you know it’s all ups and downs. You are hot, and then you are not. That is the cycle. We’re mostly like cicadas who spend most years underground and then on occasion get to come out and play. There’s no point in getting bitter or twisted about it. You just have to keep going.
When I was starting out as an actor, I was warned to hold off on playing a mother – and certainly not to play one too often – because doing so would jeopardise my chances of playing an ingenue again. But I didn’t have any qualms about that. My approach was “I want to work. I want to tell stories. I love that there are opportunities available.”
Then, in 2001, came the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive, which I think of as my launching pad. I always speak about my acting career in two parts: before that movie and after. Well, it wasn’t much of a career before; I was more a journeyman actor and I was OK with that. I thought that if I could keep going, just on one job a year, and pay my rent, I’d be happy. And I would have been.
But Mulholland Drive was when things changed for me. I’d never seen myself as a femme fatale kind of woman. But David Lynch saw me as his own version of that – or maybe more in the line of girl-next-door-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-who-had-a-sexual-awakening.
I went from there to The Ring, where I was a mother of a 10-year-old; and then in my late 40s I wound up on the TV show Gypsy. That’s when I met Billy and played that sexually curious therapist. You just never know where you will wind up when you keep following your instincts and taking chances.
Speaking up about my experience with menopause was another big career risk. But I feel like I got ahead of it. Naming what someone is thinking before they say it has let me own my vulnerability as my power. And I’ve been given terrific roles since I became vocal on this subject, including on Feud: Capote vs. The Swans and in The Friend and All’s Fair.
Of course I’ve often played older, as women often do. In the Divergent series, I played the mother of Theo James. While we were shooting, he had a birthday. I didn’t realise how close we were in age until he had a cake on set with 30 candles. Gulp. If I have my math right, I was only about 16 years older than he was. He later told an interviewer, “It was interesting because she’s playing my mum, but she’s a bit of a babe. I had to get past that.” (And, yes, when I read that interview, I blushed scarlet.)
So that’s another reason to avoid casting women to play much older than they are: so you don’t get “interesting” mother-son chemistry. (But thank you for the compliment, Theo!)
I know my career story is about a strange job not a lot of people have, but I feel like there are versions of these twists and turns in every industry. And I believe that whatever work we do, the same principles apply –trust your instincts and take chances.
Approximately 75% of women ages 45 to 55 are working. That’s a lot of women who are dealing with their ageing bodies and complex middle-aged lives in the arena of the workplace. How can we support ourselves, take the chances we need to take, and show the world what we are capable of? It’s in our interest and our employers’ interests for our workplaces to be menopause friendly, and, fortunately, flexible scheduling, remote work, and shared parental leave are becoming more common.
According to the social psychologist Dr Carol Tavris, the way to navigate work during this phase of life is “First of all, get rid of the list of obligations, or what the rational emotive therapist Albert Ellis called ‘musturbation.’ I must do this, and I must do that. I must do this other thing.”
The pressure on women to be all things to all people can be overwhelming, and menopause can add an extra layer of stress. Women who took time out of the workplace to raise their kids may feel like it’s a cruel joke that right when they’re raring to get back to work, they’re going through menopause, having to deal with symptoms exactly when they need to rally their most confident selves.
I feel more open to risk now than I ever have. For example, writing this book feels so exposing! I hate public speaking, and now here I am signing up for a book tour. (Fortunately, I’ve found that a little beta blocker can help.)
Whenever I experience impostor syndrome – and I still do, not just when I’m certain I’m out of my depth in different fields but even in my chosen field, in spite of how long I’ve been doing this work – I remember a time when I almost let it get the better of me.
I’d hit a point in my career as an actor where I was not getting jobs for a long period of time. I’d done a handful of projects and had what I thought was a great show reel. And yet I wasn’t booking anything. Finally, I went to see my agent and I said, “Why am I not getting any work?”
“Do you really want to know?” she asked me. “You want the honest answer?”
I said yes.
“You’re too intense. You make people feel uncomfortable with your nervousness. They pick up on that energy, and you then become not funny, not sexy, not dynamic. You want it too badly. It’s coming across as desperate.”
No shit, Sherlock! I am desperate!
I went home to my apartment, where I was two months late on my rent. My mum was staying with me at the time.
Recounting my day, I fell to pieces in her arms.
“That’s not true,” my mother said. “Whatever it is you are putting forward, you are not those things they’re seeing. You’re enough as you. Of course you’re nervous – you’ve had five years of rejection in a row! And you’re trying to reshape yourself into what you think they want.
“You just have to remember who you are, and eventually that will be the right version of a person that they’re looking for.”
That was a pivotal moment. I had to stop diluting and reshaping myself into what I imagined they wanted.
I think of that pep talk when I feel insecure. I remind myself of what I’ve done and who I am and why I’m in the room. I remember that it’s important to challenge myself to do things that I think will be of benefit in some way to other people, even if those things fill me with anxiety. And I’ve found that when I act in ways that are consistent with my values, I never regret having taken the leap.
Owning your vulnerabilities always leads to a more powerful outcome. Our lived experience is meaningful and has great value for workplaces. Many of the leading midlife experts say that it’s key at this point in life to find what it is we love to do and to cultivate it, and then share it. So I remind myself, and my friends when they struggle, of what my mum said: You are enough. There’s only one you.
It took me a long time to trust in all that, but now I do – even if I need a little reminder now and again.
This is an edited extract from Dare I Say It: Everything I wish I’d known about menopause by Naomi Watts, out now (Penguin Random House. $36.99)
