It’s been a good year for women on screen, both in front of the camera and behind the lens. Specifically, the 2025 Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards nominations spotlighted older actresses who play a parade of fascinating female characters. It’s early in awards season yet, I know, but it’s the seasoned actors ruling so far – and nabbing the nominations.

Years of bemoaning the dearth of good parts for women over age 40 finally seem to be paying off with meaty roles. Zoe Saldana, 46, and transgender Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón, 52, for example, are two of the three stars of nomination-leading film Emilia Pérez, described by Rotten Tomatoes as “an audacious fever dream that defies genres and expectations” that “follows the journey of four remarkable women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness.”

The career trajectory of once-objectified Canadian Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson, 57, is reflected and channeled into a poignant turn in The Last Showgirl, where she plays the eponymous performer whose future is thrown into question when her show closes after three decades. Her performance earned Anderson the first Golden Globe nomination of her career. Likewise, there’s the Hollywood history and celebrity narrative that Demi Moore, 62, brings to a role probing the expectations of sexual appeal and aging in buzzy body horror The Substance, by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, 48. 

In Maria, Angelina Jolie, 49, plays opera great Maria Callas, full of hope for career and personal renewal in what is, unbeknownst to her, the twilight of her life. There are also dark horses in the running – Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, both 64 – in Pedro Almodovar’s stylized two-hander about old friends who reunite under the spectre of assisted death in The Room Next Door.

Meanwhile, in the erotic thriller Babygirl, Nicole Kidman, 57, as a high-powered executive involved in a torrid relationship with a young intern, offers commentary on the veneer of power and and dynamics of vulnerability muffled by success. The movie was written and directed by Dutch filmmaker Halina Reign, 49 and as Kidman recently told British talk show host Graham Norton, it was “the script, it was just good. It was really good — and exciting and bold and I’m always looking to push out of my comfort zone. 

“I love supporting women in their capacity now as writers and directors and really trying to balance that in the industry,” she added of her target to work with a female director every 18 months (in fact, it’s been 15 female directors in the last seven years). Maybe that’s because they often centre women’s stories and give them more nuance to explore. 

The powerhouse performance by Fernanda Torres, 59, in Walter Salles’s best non-English picture nominee I’m Still Here (also Brazil’s Oscar entry) – about a matriarch living under the rule of military dictatorship in the early 1970s – also earned her a Best Performance nod in the Globes’ Drama category.

That’s not to say women are always the centre of the action. Sometimes they serve as its crucial and well-measured heart (there are no small roles, remember). Much of the intrigue in Conclave, for instance, takes place under the watchful eye of Isabella Rossellini’s nun, and that crucial angle of the plot earned the filmmaker and model, 72, strong supporting actress nods. As the matriarch in Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’s dazzling adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Colson Whitehead novel of a harrowing Florida reform school for boys, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, 55, is the emotional heartbeat (especially in one shattering late scene).

A question I like to pose in actor interviews is whether they could have taken on that particular role 10 or even five years previously – and the answer is invariably no. Because there’s some aspect of life, of lived experience, that draws them to certain parts and stories.

Think about it: The perkier girl-next-door Amy Adams, 50, might not have channelled the world-weary emotional fatigue and maternal ambivalence as well in Nightbitch (directed by Marielle Heller, 45, based on Rachel Yoder’s novel), adding to conversations that artist bios and group biographies have been sparking all year. Nightbitch is about a beleaguered mother, artist and gallerist who put her career on indefinite hold to raise her child.

Some of the timing and age is a feature of achieving status to wield star power and get things done. Take Kate Winslet, 49, playing fortyish in Lee, the biographical portrait of model turned photojournalist Lee Miller by filmmaker Ellen Kuras, 65. Winslet has been wanting to get the life of the war correspondent on screen for more than a decade and finally pulled the elements together for a flinty complex portrayal. 

Meanwhile, L.A.-based British actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste, 57, has been sweeping the year-end critics’ association awards. To date she’s earned year-end Best Performance accolades from the British Independent Film Awards as well as the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles critics circles for her brittle, brilliant lead in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. The tour-de-force garnered a Critics Choice nomination this week, although was left out of Golden Globes in favour of more glitzy celebrity narratives – but Jean-Baptiste is in the Oscar conversation. 

The classically-trained actress’ pitiless portrayal of an unhappy middle-aged woman, full of pain and vitriol, is the first whisper of Academy Awards contention since her 1996 breakout supporting turn in Secrets and Lies made her the first black British actress to be nominated for an Oscar. 

The 82nd Golden Globes take place Sunday, January 5; the 30th Critics Choice Awards air a week later, on Sunday January 12.

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