Cameron Diaz is 41, an age that strikes fear into the heart of many an actress. Not this one. “It is the best time of my life. I love being this age, are you kidding?” she exclaims, sitting bolt upright on a jade velvet sofa in an airy Los Angeles hotel suite.
Not that Diaz looks her age, of course. Lean and athletic, from rigorous hours logged at the gym, she is dazzlingly pretty, with sparkling blue eyes. No wonder she isn't concerned about the passage of time.
But Diaz, who recently co-wrote “The Body Book”, a self-help manual that encourages women to be more accepting about their appearance, goes further. “I can't wait to be older,” she says with an ear-to-ear dimpled smile. It's an unusual thing to hear from an A-lister in Hollywood, where the cult of youth still rules supreme, though Diaz sees it differently. “This is something we really need to reframe,” she says. “The most interesting parts are for women who are over 40. We don't see it that way, because they're not the sexy parts. Look at the Oscar nominees in the last decade.” Diaz reels off a list that includes Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren and Dame Judi Dench. “We're not giving those women enough credit for what they're accomplishing, which is beautiful performances.”
Sunny and spontaneous, she has an unshakeably optimistic perspective on life, which she puts down to a happy childhood in Long Beach, with her Anglo-German mother Billie, Cuban-American father Emilio and sister Chimene.
The idea of acting for a living seemed far-fetched. “Where I grew up, the options were slim to nothing. In any given year there were at least seven to 10 girls walking around school pregnant. A lot dropped out. A lot ended going to jail, dying or falling victim to drug abuse. But there were also a lot who pulled themselves out of it – [like] Snoop and I,” she says, referring to the rapper Snoop Dogg, who was also at the school. “And some of them have a family and a nice job and live comfortably.”
“The thing about fame is that it doesn't change you – it actually makes you more of who you are. People who are famous are held more accountable than other human beings. You can't go out into the world without somebody taking a picture and sharing it with everybody else. So you do your best to be the person that you want people to see you as. For me, that means being as authentic as possible. I'm no different when I am with you than with anybody else.”
Diaz's rise is well documented. A model as a teenager, at 22 she auditioned for “The Mask” (1994) and became an overnight success. She is now one of the industry's top female earners (and reportedly the highest-paid actress over 40), and her films have made nearly $3 billion. There have been mainstream hits such as “Bad Teacher” (2011) and the Shrek franchise, but also riskier roles such as “Being John Malkovich” (1999), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe.
Despite all her acting success, she regards her book as one of her biggest accomplishments. “I wrote it because a lot of women don't see themselves as beautiful. I'm talking about having a real relationship with your own body. Getting older is not just about your butt dropping, it means that our bodies start to break down and we die. But the journey from here to there doesn't have to be one of hatred, wishing you looked like you did when you were 25.” Neither does she have a fixed opinion on motherhood. “I've never said never to anything in life. If I wanted kids, at any point in life, I would have them. I can't see the future, but one thing I do know is that I'm not childless. I have a ton of children in my life. I can have a kid any second, if I want,'” she says with a laugh.
“I also, by the way, have a lot of girl friends who don't have children. I just didn't do that in life -- and I'm okay with that. I know the choices I made. I know why I made them. I'm very much a person who lives in the moment. When you come from where I do, there are so many ways my life could have gone.”
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