The Stars We Deserve

From Standpoint:

...Youth and glamour are incompatible: as Joan Collins once said, there is no such thing as a glamorous baby. When, as Rhett Butler, Clark Gable was giving his final brush-off to Scarlett O'Hara, he was 38 years old, a full ten years younger than our own Tom Cruise. Gable appeared like an experienced man-of-the-world, who'd put childish things behind him. Cruise on the other hand is a perpetual Peter Pan, an eager beaver who relies on his impetuous energy for his appeal. When she was perfecting ‘The Look' in To Have and Have Not in 1944, Lauren Bacall was barely 20. Both Gable and Bacall were still young — but they aspired to adulthood. We no longer do. And so we get the movie stars we deserve.