‘Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming back’: ageing, ageism and the lifespan of female celebrity

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editors of Celebrity Studies at Routledge who enthusiastically supported the concept for this special edition from its inception, and to the authors featured here who approached it with both industry and imagination. I owe a debt of gratitude to the colleagues and students who have formed an audience for this work at various times and venues, including the Bournemouth University Media School Post-Doctoral Research Group; the ‘RomCom, Actually’ conference at De Montfort University, 2011; and the London Film and Media Conference, 2011. Thanks also to the colleagues in the Department of Media, Culture and Language at Roehampton University for their support during the period of research leave which enabled me to complete this project. This collection is for my husband, Matt Wagner, for understanding how precious time is and yet putting so much of it my way; and in loving memory of our friend, Kathy Dudding, who would have made an awesome old lady.

Notes

1. In the long term, though, this shift to later retirement and the economic downturn more broadly may well have a negative impact on life expectancy. Similarly, the vision of consumerism among older people engendered by Saga style marketing is far removed from the evidence of the prevalence of poverty among the 65+ demograph in the United States and United Kingdom, for example.

2. There is, however, an important emerging body of further scholarship in the field, dealing with film (Wearing 2007, Tally 2008, Negra 2009, Chivers 2011), ‘makeover TV’ (Heller 2007, Weber 2009) and cross-media forms (Negra 2009). In addition, in 2008 the innovative AHRC-funded ‘Women, Ageing and the Media’ Research Network and Workshop project in the United Kingdom produced a valuable archive of material, available from: http://www.wam-research.org.uk/.