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EW Role Call: Hollywood's top cradle robbers

Older actors, younger actresses: 'Shopgirl' inspires countdown

By Gary Susman
Entertainment Weekly

Steve Martin romances Claire Danes in "Shopgirl."

• EW.com: Review: 'Shopgirl'

YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS

(Entertainment Weekly) -- Wait a minute. Is that Steve Martin romancing Claire Danes -- an actress less than half his age -- in "Shopgirl"?

Well, that must be what passes for reality in Hollywood, the land where actors play sexually desirable characters well into their AARP years. The result is several decades of movies whose senior-and-ingenue couples can't help but give off a Humbert-and-Lolita vibe.

Though extreme examples of on-screen cradle robbing may seem cringe-worthy, moviegoers continue to make May-December romances into hits.

Clearly, older male stars -- heroes like Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, and Harrison Ford, and comfortably familiar comic charmers like Martin or Woody Allen -- still know how to turn wishful thinking about the appeal of older males into a big-screen reality.

At least "Shopgirl" addresses the age gap; most movies don't even acknowledge the strangeness of a 20-to-30-year difference between the romantic leads.

And, despite a Mrs. Robinson every now and then, actresses rarely get the same leeway. Just look at Uma Thurman, whose romance as an ancient 37-year-old with a 23-year-old beau is presented as a real shocker in the new movie "Prime." Did we just hear the words "double standard"?

In the following gallery, we look at the romantic roles of 10 veteran leading men. We chose five movies that paired each of them with much younger love interests (plus, to be fair, one role opposite an older actress). Then we added the age gaps and came up with an unscientific, but nonetheless revealing, average.

Read on as we count down to the old goat who got our highest age-gap rating.

Click here to see the gallery.

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