PRIME TIME
From THAT Liz Hurley scene in son’s film to A-lister’s ‘sex surrogate’ role… stars stripping & getting racier with age
One Oscar legend did her first full frontal at 62
DEMI Moore is no stranger to getting naked in public.
How could we forget the Vanity Fair cover of pregnant Demi totally naked whilst cradling her baby bump?
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Then there were her star turns in movies Striptease and Indecent Proposal. Now at the age of 61 she has stripped off again for her new feminist horror movie The Substance.
The film has become the talk of Cannes where it received an 11 minute standing ovation after its premiere.
There are several nude scenes with her co-star Margaret Qualley - the 29-year-old daughter of Four Weddings and a Funeral star Andie McDowell.
Moore plays a fading celebrity who uses a black market cell-replicating device to create a younger, better version of herself, played by Qualley.
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Demi seems unfazed by the nude scenes saying: “I had someone who was a great partner who I felt very safe with.
"We obviously were quite close — naked — and we also got a lot of levity in those moments at how absurd those certain situations were when laying on the tile floor.
“But ultimately. it’s just about really directing your communication and mutual trust.”
And she isn’t the only actress of a certain age still prepared to bare all in the name of their art.
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Liz Hurley
Eyebrows were raised when 58-year-old Liz stripped off for - directed by her son Damian.
The raunchy scenes featuring Liz and 28-year-old co-star Pear Chiravara appear in 22-year-old Damian’s directorial debut movie Strictly Confidential.
But Liz, who exudes body confidence by regularly posting bikini snaps of herself on social media, says people were making a lot of fuss about nothing.
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“Yes, of course, people have got their knickers in a twist about it a bit,” she said.
“But actually for us it wasn’t a big deal at all, just one of the seven scenes we were shooting on that day. We didn’t have a lot of time. It was a night scene… and the minute it gets dark the mosquitoes start dive-bombing you. There was a bit of exposed flesh for the mosquitoes to get.”
Kate Winslet
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Oscar winner Kate is no stranger to on-screen nudity, famously stripping off as Rose in Titanic.
But after giving birth to three children, Kate, now 48, vowed never to get naked on film again.
However she changed her mind to normalise the idea of a middle-aged gran having sex and one night stands in Mare of Easttown.
Not only did she strip off for a sex scene with Guy Pearce, she told the New York Times she refused to let director Craig Zobel edit out “a bulgy bit of belly," saying: “Don’t you dare!”
She said: “Listen, I hope that in playing Mare as a middle-aged woman, I guess that’s why people have connected with this character in the way that they have done because there are clearly no filters,”
Winslet added. “She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from.”
Julianne Moore
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Oscar winner Julianne was 49 when she got naked in the movie Chloe about a married woman who embarks on a steamy lesbian affair.
Amanda Seyfried, then aged 24, starred opposite as call-girl Chloe, and both women had to shed their inhibitions for the intimate scenes, which Julianne admitted made her nervous. “It’s tricky stuff to do,” she said, adding: “Obviously there’s something inherently dangerous about doing a scene like that, but it was all very deliberately staged, we watched playback, we were able to adjust things.”
But in 2019, Julianne stripped off again aged 58 to star in Gloria Bell, about a free-spirited divorced mum-of-two who falls in love.
Despite first getting naked on screen in 1993’s Body of Evidence she says she never gets used to it.
"Somebody asked me, 'How do you become comfortable?' And I'm like, 'You don't. Nobody's comfortable,' she said.
Helen Hunt
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Hunt was Oscar-nominated for her part as sex surrogate Cheryl in the 2012 film The Sessions.
The film was based on the story of Mark O’Brien, a poet who was paralysed from the neck down due to polio and hired a sex surrogate to lose his virginity.
The role required full frontal nudity from the then 48-year-old Hunt who said she embraced the sex scenes.
"I think I thought a couple of times before we shot the movie. I said to my boyfriend: 'I'm about to do this'. Should you be stopping me from doing this? Because this is about to happen,” she recalled.
"I said to another friend of mine, it's getting late... who cares? Maybe one of the great things about getting older is, who cares?
"To get a chance to embody a woman, particularly a woman who's not 20 years old, and celebrate that we all have bodies and everybody has a god-given right to feel pleasure. I liked being part of bringing that to life.”
Emma Thompson
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Stripping off at the age of 62 was “a challenge” admitted Dame Emma, who tackled full frontal nudity for her role in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.
Emma played Nancy, a sexually frustrated widow, who hires a sex worker in the hope of experiencing her very first orgasm.
In order to break the ice, she and her co-star, 29-year-old Irish actor Daryl McCormack, went for a walk together on Hampstead Heath to get to know each other.
But she says the demands society places on women to look a certain way meant she was still apprehensive about getting naked.
"Oh, God. Well, it’s very challenging to be nude at 62," she told the Daily Mail.
“Especially in a world where nothing has changed in the dreadful demands made on women to look a certain way.
"It’s something I’ve been thinking about writing on since I was in my 20s, and the young female actors I speak to now still suggest there’s the same thing going on, a sort of tyranny to make women lose their self-confidence.
I said to a friend of mine, it's getting late... who cares? Maybe one of the great things about getting older is, who cares?
Helen Hunt
“It was very interesting to me, because I realised that if I’m not near any mirrors and I look down at my body, it looks fine. I can see my toes and it doesn’t look horrible.
“But as soon as I look in a mirror, I see nothing but flaws. It was definitely an interesting thing to experiment with.”
Helen Mirren
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Dame Helen has been naked countless times during her career since her very first on-screen nude scenes in the 1969 film Age of Consent aged just 22.
But she was 58 when she confidently stripped off in the 2003 British comedy Calendar Girls about a group of middle-aged Yorkshire women who decide to produce a nude calendar to raise money for Leukaemia Research with the support of the Women's Institutes.
Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole previously joked that Helen was almost too comfortable on set during her nude scenes.
He said: "After one nude shoot, I recall having to tell Helen Mirren to put her robe back on three or four times”.
Helen decided to undress one more time in 2011 in a nude photoshoot for New York Magazine, but the actress later declared that this would be her last time going naked in front of the camera.
In a CBS interview, the actress said: "I was doing nude scenes [from] the first moment I started doing movies, it was the era. It seemed to be nothing to get your knickers in a twist over.
"That’s the good thing about getting older, you don’t have to do that sort of thing any more."
Anne Reid
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The Brit actress was 68 when she stripped off for sex scenes with the then 35-year-old Daniel Craig in the film The Mother.
Anne played a widow who initiated an affair with her daughter’s boyfriend, played by Craig.
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She later revealed she was so anxious about filming the raunchy scenes that the night before she got drunk and burst into tears.
Anne, who also starred as Valerie Barlow in Coronation Street, said: ”I rang my son and I was weeping and he said, ‘Look Mum, it’s a great part, if you’re inhibited it’s not going to work so just go for it’".
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