Hot 'Mammas': Older actors take the lead

It's a movie without monsters, explosions, car crashes or any special effects, unless you count Pierce Brosnan's singing voice.

Nevertheless, Mamma Mia!, the movie version of the long-running Broadway "jukebox musical," is doing just fine, thank you, at the box office.

Despite opening the same time as The Dark Knight, Mama Mia! managed to gross a respectable $27.8 million on its opening weekend. (Entertainment Weekend claims it actually clipped The Dark Knight's opening gross by luring female fans away.)

Since then, the little film that could has shown remarkable legs. For the Aug. 1 weekend, it hit a total gross of $88 million, putting it fourth at the box office. It's already passed the total take of the Oscar-winning Sweeney Todd, and if tickets continue selling at this rate, it could eclipse last summer's musical hit, Hairspray.

What's intriguing here is that almost all of this movie's stars are potential subscribers to the AARP magazine: Meryl Streep (born June 22, 1949), Christine Baranski (May 2, 1952) and Julie Walters (Feb. 22, 1950). The film's male stars are 55-year-old Pierce Brosnan, 57-year-old Stellan Skarsgard, and Colin Firth, a mere slip of a lad at 47.

Not only that: The three vintage female leads aren't playing wise mentors or cute old aunts or comical grannies. All three get to enjoy some flirtation and romance, just like big screen teenagers.

That's rare in Hollywood, where the double standard reigns supreme. Harrison Ford still qualifies as an action hero at the age of 66, Sylvester Stallone was playing Rambo again at 62, and Sean Connery, who's earned his retirement, was still buckling swashes in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when he was 73. It's notorious that leading men in the movies are still winning the favors of 19-year-old starlets at an age when most guys on our planet are golf-playing grandpas.

Things are tougher for women, though, and despite all the carryings-on by Susan Sarandon, Sharon Stone and Kim Cattrall, and all the Internet nonsense about "cougars," an actress at 45 is assumed to be vanishing into Happily Ever After Land.

It was nice, for example, to see Karen Allen again in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, back playing Marion Ravenwood as she did in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Baranski has been busier, but things are generally somewhat easier for a character comic, and a lot of her work has been voice-overs for cartoons.

Streep works regularly as well, but lately she's been taking suit-and-glasses roles in ultra-serious films like Rendition or Lions for Lambs. Until Mama Mia!, she hadn't had a real lead since 2006's The Devil Wears Prada, and she's been doing her share of cartoon jobs, too. (See: The Ant Bully.)

Walters - who won an Oscar nomination opposite Michael Caine - played the dance instructor in Billy Elliot (2000), but aside from the occasional Murder, She Wrote-style TV mystery, she's mainly been showing up as Ron Weasley's mom in the Harry Potter movies.

The exception that proves the rule here was 2003's Calendar Girls, in which Walters teamed with Helen Mirren and a clutch of Masterpiece Theatre regulars such as Annette Crosbie and Celia Imre. For once, mature women were allowed to play leads, not supporting roles with 10, maybe 15 minutes of screen time. Not only that, they were allowed to have love lives, not to mention sex lives.

Now, name another movie between Calendar Girls and Mama Mia! where that's the case.

OK, maybe the 2005 British indie Mrs. Henderson Presents, which allowed Judi Dench to romance Bob Hoskins between re-enactments of topless reviews.

Otherwise, I'm stumped.

Clarification

A noun somehow vanished from my column last week, so in case you were wondering, Francoise Dorleac, Omar Sharif's love interest in Genghis Khan (1965), was Catherine Deneuve's older sister. (Deneuve took her stage name from her mother's family; their father was the actor Maurice Dorleac.)

Dorleac was on her way to stardom, having starred in Roman Polanski's Cul-de-sac, Roger Vadim's La Ronde and the Jean Paul Belmondo spy spoof The Man from Rio. On June 26, 1967, her car flipped and burned on a Riviera motorway. She was just 25 when she was killed instantly.

Ben Steelman: 343-2208

ben.steelman@starnewsonline.com