My harsh message to curly-haired midlife women like Gillian Anderson

I like to think I’d recognise Gillian Anderson in any of her guises – whether playing as Agent Scully in The X Files, Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education or Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.

There’s something cool and sphynx-like in her demeanour that transcends any role.

But when the 57-year-old appeared on the red carpet at Cannes this week for her new film Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma with a long mane of crazy curls, I had to look again – then once more – to check it was her and not Dolly Parton’s lesser-known cousin, about to stage a comeback at the Grand Ole Opry.

I suddenly realised I was manifesting an undeniable societal prejudice that dictates a tumbling mass of wild curls – especially when sported by a middle-aged woman – is unkempt, unserious and unruly to the point of peril.

Smooth-haired Anderson projects a persona that can save the world from alien invasion and rogue FBI agents, but with insane ringlets she looks more like Melanie Griffiths when she was still a humble secretary in Working Girl. Lest we forget, Griffiths’ character Tess McGill doesn’t manage to claw her way to the top until she swaps that frizzy mop for a shorter style, along with a 1980s corporate ‘blow-out’.

And we see this prejudice everywhere. Calling on the age-old trope of the madwoman in the attic, we (encouraged by men, no doubt) see a woman not in control of her hair as being not in control of herself – and therefore unlikely to be fully respected or relied upon.

Gillian Anderson at the Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma photocall at the Cannes Film Festival

I’ve felt this diminishing of status myself when my hair is left to its own devices after a wash, rather than being blow-dried into submission with my BaByliss Super Power dryer. At 58, I have a fair bit of natural curl in my locks and no one (with the exception of my husband) seems to welcome it.

I once turned up au naturel for an important meeting with a potential investor on a magazine project and my business partner said crossly, ‘You look like you’ve just got out of bed’, even though I was wearing a Vivienne Westwood suit and LK Bennett pumps. All he could see was my big, wild barnet and the implication was that I wasn’t being businesslike – and had maybe had red-hot sex beforehand (with all the wanton behaviour that ‘bed hair’ implies).

This is why I now only opt for untrammelled curls when I’m on holiday and have been swimming in the sea.

In a similar vein, my friend Belinda, who has a mane of brunette curls straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting, spent a year in Paris in her 50s doing an MA. She reported that, whenever she’d lacked time to tame her cascading ringlets, she was ignored by shop assistants, who treated her like a dangerous kook to be screened out of their visual field.

But when she had sleek, styled tresses, they would flock to help her. She felt it had something to do with the characterisation of witches in myths and fiction, who were almost always depicted like ‘mad older women with long, crazy hair trailing down their backs’.

When I looked at some online comments about Anderson’s new look, they weren’t kind – though I have to say many women loved it. One man said the actress looked like she’d suffered ‘a massive electrical shock’, while another said it was ‘medication time’ and quite a few people felt she was too old for that hairstyle.

I would imagine few of these would-be style mavens are aware that, in 2015, Anderson talked at some length about experiencing hair loss and thinning, after being exposed to excessive styling and over-dyeing for acting roles.

Gillian Anderson with her straight bob as Agent Dana Scully in The X Files, alongside David Duchovny as Agent Fox Mulder

Beyonce at the 2026 Met Gala. At 44, the singer is still the Queen of Curls, says Rowan Pelling

Who knows if the new look was bolstered by extensions or similar hair wizardry, but I imagine it was huge fun to step onto that red carpet with the kind of Big Hair that made the 1980s so exuberant. Can it be a coincidence that she sported this look the same week Jilly Cooper’s hairspray-and-lust extravaganza Rivals returned to our screens?

Surely it’s time to ask why it’s somehow been decreed that only young women (and, to be fair, actress Andie MacDowell, 68) can go out with crazy curls and still be viewed as both sexy and serious? Young men too, come to that. Both my sons have inherited Medici-like dark brown curls from their father and find themselves feted for their tumbling fringes, which are currently in fashion. Some of their male friends have even had perms to emulate this look.

But anyone female and over the age of 50 is somehow supposed to bow out of the romantic, corkscrew-curled arena and leave it to Zendaya and Beyonce. (At 44, Beyonce is still the Queen of Curls, as this month’s Met Gala look showed.)

The mixed reaction to Anderson’s hairdo reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s 2001 speech to Yale students at their Class Day where she told them ‘hair matters’ and they should ‘pay attention to their hair, because everyone else will’.

I learnt the truth of this after an appearance on BBC’s Question Time in 2002. I was stopped by two women on my way home who said they’d watched the debate and wanted to ask me something. I waited in trepidation until one said, ‘We wondered where you’d had your sleek and chic hair done’.