‘I was told I would never work again’: Naomi Watts opens up about menopause and ageism in Hollywood

Naomi Watts was once subjected to a particularly insidious strain of misogyny: the ageist kind. While men in Hollywood are allowed to age and go grey (and even keep doing action roles when they do!) the same kindness is not granted to women. Now, Watts has something to say about it.

The actress has written a book about aging and menopause titled Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause. British newspaper The Times has published an extract.

It took a while before Watts was comfortable writing the book. She was, as she says within its pages, “s*** scared” about it. A huge part of that fear could be attributed to the stigma attached to female aging in Hollywood. “I’d been warned ever since I started acting that calling attention to your age—when that age was not 23 or younger—would be career suicide,” she wrote. “I was told I would never work again if I admitted to being menopausal, or even perimenopausal. Hollywood’s lovely term for such women was ‘unf***able.'”

Watts herself reached the perimenopause stage at 36, a younger age than usual. Now, she wants to inform other women about what exactly menopause entails. “We can discuss without shame the details of menopause—how to navigate it, what the symptoms could be, and not just, ‘Oh, you might feel warm at some point,’ but the gory details,” she wrote. It’s not exactly a subject that’s much discussed in Hollywood. Watts continued:

“I didn’t know my skin would get so dry, or that urinary tract infections and gastrointestinal issues would become commonplace, or that there was such a long list of other issues connected to the menopausal transition. I was craving information on menopause, and certainly no one in Hollywood was breathing a word about it. We were all behaving as if between the seductress years and the grandmother roles, women just … I don’t know, vanished?”

Then there’s the issue of sex and menopause. Watts brought this up when she wrote about her second husband, actor Billy Crudup. The couple are the same age, but Watts was anxious about him knowing she’d hit menopause.

After meeting on the set of the 2017 Netflix show Gypsy, the pair embarked on a sexual relationship. But before their first time together, Watts “went into the bathroom before getting naked and furiously attempted to scratch a hormone patch off my body.” She was, she remembered, “mortified” about it, and Crudup asked her what the matter was. She told him, she wrote in the book, “I wear these hormone patches, and I didn’t want you to see it because then you would know I’m in early menopause, which means I am old, and you wouldn’t want me and, oh my God, should I just leave?”

He didn’t leave. Crudup was very supportive of Watts and now, of course, they’re married. Watts has no regrets about writing something so personal in her book. “You can’t do this in half measures. There’s no point in me putting pen to paper and writing a whole book without it being confronting,” she told British Vogue. “I need to not just soothe myself through this experience, but hopefully reach others and speak to whatever discomfort they’re going through—and that means going into parts of yourself that you need to know better, or [that] you’re afraid of, even.”

Hopefully, her book will encourage more women to talk about the menopause.