The furore over The Thorn Birds actress Rachel Ward’s appearance on a video she posted last week demonstrates, once again, our inability to celebrate – or even accept – the natural process of women ageing.
In the post she is wearing steel-rimmed specs, her neck and décolletage are mottled and her cropped hair is silver. She looks her 68 years and the comments the post triggered are brutal. ‘She looks ragged’ and ‘Throwing in the towel is not the way to go’ are just two of many.
I was intrigued to see how she looks now. Rachel and I knew each other as children, but haven’t crossed paths in decades.
I first met her at the age of ten, along with her eco-warrior younger sister Tracy, now Duchess of Beaufort.
Even at that age, I remember envying their long legs. I was even more impressed at how Rachel fearlessly ran along a high wall in her garden, while I was terrified.
She had such physical confidence. When we hit the London party circuit together in our late teens, years before The Thorn Birds, she was acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful girls of her generation – the kind of person that made the rest of us look like another breed of humanity.
She had naturally olive skin, high cheekbones and a greyhound figure, but her beauty was something more. Of course, knowing you’re the most beautiful girl in the room gives you an allure, but she had such a careless vivacity that made every other pretty girl simply fade into insignificance.
Anyone who has bothered to search out other recent images of Rachel will see she is still undeniably beautiful – just a 68-year-old beauty.
Rachel Ward appeared in a video on her Instagram page last week – and the comments were brutal. ‘She looks ragged’ and ‘Throwing in the towel is not the way to go’ are just two of many
Rachel Ward poses with her co-star Jean Simmons on the set of The Thorn Birds in 1983
Followers of her social media, where she talks about the cattle farm she now owns in Australia’s New South Wales, will know she consistently posts warts-and-all pictures of herself. She is usually make-up free, under a battered khaki sunhat, shot in whatever light is available, and unretouched – not for her the many filters available to blur the signs of age.
She still has the broad smile, fine bones and the wicked eyes of her youth, yet, unlike other great beauties, she is untrammelled by the need to, let’s say, scrub herself up.
I wouldn’t want to compare myself in any way to the ravishing Rachel, but having been in charge of Vogue for so long and been part of an industry that celebrates youthful good looks, I have always found a comfort in, as it were, presenting myself unvarnished.
I fear a portrait in the attic one day catching up with me, and would rather confront the reality.
If I’m honest, it’s not always easy seeing myself with heavy jowls, undereye bags and the dreaded downturned mouth. And heaven knows there are commentators online (should you read them) who can be vile in their criticism.
However, there’s something comforting in coming to terms with what-you-see-is-what-you-get. I suspect that having been such a beauty in her youth, and having realised how little that charmed appearance mattered as she got older, Rachel has happily made the decision to adopt a similar approach to me. She knows what really counts in life – and it’s not an unlined face.
That said, I’m also sure that, like most of us, she occasionally glances back fondly at the odd picture of how she used to look and thinks – wow, that wasn’t so bad.
Drumming is child’s play, and I’m no child
Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi and South Korean president Lee Jae Myung shared a drumming session last week after their talks in Japan.
Lee had confessed to Takaichi, herself an amateur drummer, his ambition to also master the instrument. After that public exhibition of chaotic banging, he will have realised how very hard it is.
I, too, had ambitions to be a drummer and, pre-Covid, took lessons from one of my son’s friends. It was only a month until I had to admit defeat.
The intricacies of the foot-hand co-ordination, and trying to combine the high hat, the snare and kick drum was mind-scramblingly tricky – and not helped by my tutor’s insistence that his seven-year-old pupils had mastered it in weeks.
I’d just about made it through Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama before drumming was put to rest in the graveyard of my unfulfilled ambitions. But at least, like Takaichi, I gave it a go.
South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung (left) and Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi (right) playing the drums in Nara, western Japan on January 13
A private club that Sir Keir couldn’t join
In the run up to his defection, Robert Jenrick appeared to have had several meetings with supposed man-of-the-people Nigel Farage at both Oswald’s and 5 Hertford Street.
These private members clubs – heavenly spots though they are – are humongously expensive, unaffordable even to some of the one per cent.
Imagine the outcry if Labour figures such as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper were known to use them as their local hangout – and the investigation into who was footing the bill.
Robert Jenrick (left) appeared to have several meetings with Nigel Farage (right) at both Oswald’s and 5 Hertford Street
I’ve little appetite for these leftover sales
Thank goodness the winter sales are entering their last weeks. I rarely buy clothes in the sales and, if I ever do, they are invariably a mistake.
There’s something joyless about the racks of marked down goods and, although the process is less depressing online, it’s still a bit like surveying the contents of the fridge, only to find dispiriting leftovers.
How can a screen beat a baby’s gaze?
There are more baby buggies than dogs where I live in London, and that’s saying something.
Watching the adorable small people go about in their prams almost gives me a yearning to be a grandmother, but should that ever happen, I promise I will not push my grandchildren around while staring into my smartphone.
It’s so depressing seeing these babies staring adoringly at carers who only have eyes for screens.
