KEY POINTS:
I've had a squinty eye on Demi Moore for a few years now. I like Demi, or at least I used to.
As a child of the 80s I've seen her through many a cinematic incarnation as she progressed from nubile bratpacker to A-list star.
Like the rest of her fans I've looked on with admiration and amazement at the physical transformations that have defined her career. From role to role, Moore has remade herself in whatever mould the character demanded.
The apogee of her shapeshifting happened in 1997 when she made GI Jane. If the movie was ultimately forgettable, Moore's transformation was anything but. Who can forget her at the premiere; bald and muscular in a simple black dress, looking like a more serene and far more buff version of Sinead O'Connor.
Audiences were stunned. True actors like nothing better than to throw on some crazy facial hair and cultivate a disability for a role; Daniel Day Lewis has made a career out of being unintelligible and/or paraplegic. But for a Hollywood starlet to do the same thing is far less common. Especially one like Demi, so defined by her looks throughout her career, from the big haired starlet of St Elmo's Fire to the gaminely grief stricken widow of Ghost.
In demonstrating her supreme control over her own body Demi ensured her unique place in the Hollywood pantheon. Here was a woman able to remake not just her image or her hairstyle, but literally her own flesh and bone using nothing more than preternatural will power and some very expensive personal trainers.
Granted she did it at the behest of the Studio, but there was something empowering in the fact that she did it at all.
Which makes it so sad to see proof that this strong, ground breaking woman has finally crossed over into Crazytown. Its been in the post for a while now. In the last decade, when the movie roles dried up due to a self imposed hiatus, Demi appears to have turned from transforming herself for roles to the much more ambitious project of attempting to confound time itself.
There was the Charlie's Angels cameo, a flashy bit-part that necessitated millions of dollars worth of plastic surgery and paid off when Demi tore up the screen in a bikini, a beach body not seen since Bo Derek in 10.
Most famously there was Ashton, the boy-toy cum soulmate who was the gold plated cherry on top of Demi's incredible physical achievement.
Looking at her in pictures over the last 24 months, hand in hand with a handsome man almost half her age with her perfect body, fabulous wardrobe and radiant smile, there is no doubt but that this woman has somehow stumbled upon some sort of elixir.
What is it? Well she's been fairly upfront about the surgery, and she hints that sex with Ashton isn't too shabby either. She also credits the mystical Kabbalah. My money has always been on a covered portrait in her attic that must be covered with carbuncles by now. Hey, whatever works.
Lately though, I've been noticing that youthful glow in her eyes is looking a bit more like the fevered gleam of the zealot. How far has the woman gone in her quest for Eternal Beauty? All the way to Austria actually. Demi announced the exact nature of her youth dew this week on the Letterman show and it isn't for the faint hearted.
Watching her extol the virtues of having her blood sucked by leeches on an Austrian health farm, I wondered if Letterman, like me, was thinking of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the 17th century Hungarian aristocrat who, legend has it, bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth? Sure Demi's having the blood sucked out of her, rather than splashing around in someone else's, but both crackpot remedies smack of the same desperation to stay young at any cost.
I felt another twinge of regret reading an interview with Julie Christie, the actress whose great, melancholy beauty lit up Dr Zhivago and Don't Look Now, in which she admitted she's had "some work" done, chiefly because she can't bear to do what she does as she ages. The irony of course is that Christie's had huge critical and commercial success recently with Away from Her, a film that deals with the psychological effects of ageing.
In the words of the Coens, by way of Cormac McCarthy, with apologies to Yeats, This is No Country for Old Men.
We live in a world that values youth above all, the cruelty of ageing is the irrevocable distance it places between the old and the young.
Nowhere is this more pronounced and more savagely unfair than in the case of women. A few honourable exceptions (Nanas, Aunties, your Mum) notwithstanding, young women and older women don't like each other's company.
The former see the latter as memento mori, a foreshadowing of the decay that time has in store for them. Older women, as well as envying younger women, are frustrated by them. With the benefit of hindsight they see just how many opportunities pretty young things squander through the ignorance and inexperience of youth.
That is not to say that women are better or worse at any age. They aren't, they're simply different. And that difference is what makes it hard for us to communicate with one another as time goes by.
The fact that there's probably quite a few of you glaring at my unlined byline picture and thinking "what would she know" just proves my point.
