A few years ago, when I first saw a tweet suggesting film star Florence Pugh – then 24 – was in an “age-inappropriate” relationship with a director, my inner speculo-meter went crazy.
What kind of gap were we talking about? Charlie Chaplin’s 36-year gap from wife Oona O’Neil, or maybe Woody Allen’s 35-year gap from his former step-daughter Soon-Yi Previn? Perhaps it was more of a Sam Taylor-Johnson and Aaron Taylor-Johnson thing, the director being 24 years older than her actor husband?
Imagine my molehill-to-mountain surprise when I found out that the Little Women actor’s then beau, Scrubs star Zach Braff, was 21 years older. So, neither a grandfather nor a teen, and therefore within the wide spectrum of what should be socially acceptable dating possibilities – as opposed to Jeffrey Epstein sleeping with underage, trafficked teens when he was in his 50s.
The outrage at Pugh’s relationship was so vocal across social media back then that the actress felt compelled to make a powerful statement: “I’ve always found it funny how I can be good enough for people to watch my work, and support my work, and pay for tickets, and I’m old enough to be an adult and pay taxes, but I’m not old enough to know who I should and should not have sex with.”
The hurt has clearly lingered, as the actress – now 29 – discussed the topic again this week on Louis Theroux’s podcast, saying: “It was an insane amount of abuse being hurled at my relationship just because there was an age gap.” She also made it clear that the person who really reaped the abuse was Braff, as if he was the child-snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I feel Pugh’s pain. When I was 23 – the age the actress started dating Braff – I started stepping out with a 50-year-old architect who bore a distinct resemblance to Beethoven, with a wild cloud of grey hair. My family might have been shocked, were it not for the fact that my father, who died when I was 20, was 27 years older than my mother, a relationship that lasted until the grave and produced five children.
There were all kinds of reasons beyond daddy issues that attracted me to the architect. First, the fact that I had found men my own age something of a disappointment, which is also something Pugh has cited. And second, one simple fact dawned on me: most males don’t really grow up until their forties. So, if you didn’t want to carry an immature, insecure young man through the practice stages of a grown-up relationship, where he made all his mistakes with you (including prioritising his own sexual pleasure), you might be better off seeking someone with experience.
I also enjoyed the glamour of having a partner who could sweep me off to Le Caprice, before retiring to his Notting Hill pad. But by far the biggest part of the attraction was that he was a highly intelligent, naughty, funny polymath who gave me invaluable life lessons.
Even so, friends and even complete strangers used to question the relationship. We were once in a restaurant when a City type in a suit came up and asked if I was my boyfriend’s daughter or lover, “because we were having a bet on it”. Our spring-autumn love became the world’s business. Some of my boyfriend’s women friends disapproved of the attachment so strongly they could barely say “Hello”, while his male friends often treated me like open season and would make unsubtle passes.
Florence Pugh with her former boyfriend Zach Braff. Theirs was a 21-year age gap (Getty Images)
But this was 1991. What truly amazes me is that, in the supposedly enlightened 2020s, we are still behaving like passion has age restrictions among people who are consenting adults. You can’t applaud gender role-reversing cougars like Madonna or Heidi Klum, who are with younger guys, without also allowing middle-aged blokes to date women in their 20s.
Yes, we all chortle as Leonardo DiCaprio sags and a succession of young supermodel partners look ever more like his nieces, but they’re old enough to make that choice. He’s not holding out a film role to them, or forcing himself upon them in hotel bedrooms like Harvey Weinstein. There’s a difference between predation and just, er, having a type – even if that means he’s so inflexible that lovers aren’t not allowed to reach 30 and still be girlfriend material.
Plenty of older men and women just happen to be smart and drop-dead sexy. I’ve been musing a lot on Lesley Manville, who, at 69, is about to play the erotically manipulative, sharp-witted Marquise de Merteuil in the National Theatre’s new adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. She proves there’s no age limit on sexual charisma and danger – even my 21-year-old son can see she’s magnetic.
Some people just become sexier with each decade. For my money, the most coolly attractive man in Game of Thrones was Charles Dance, then in his sixties. Perhaps the thing critics really can’t bear is that an Antony or Cleopatra is sweeping off a Romeo or Juliet against all the odds, making everyone else feel like a loser. Well, as the goddess Pugh says, get over it: “I stood up for him and I stood up for me just being allowed to do what the f*** I wanted to do.”
Time for the self-appointed sex police to find a new target.
