This article first appeared in The House of Wellness magazine.
Working in an industry that traditionally prizes youth, Robyn Malcolm is making it her business to flip the script. She believes she owes it to women of every age, as well as herself.
The award-winning actress and Bafta nominee is celebrating turning 61, and you won’t find her attempting to wind back the clock on her appearance or pretending to be something she is not.
In an upcoming role her character “is a bit more glam” and she says she fought hard “against the urge to be vain” when she found herself feeling self-conscious during filming.
“I lose most of my clothes a few times and I’m in bathing suits. I don’t often do glamorous – I go the other way, and there was this voice in my head, which was: ‘You’re not really the kind of actress that they normally pick for those kinds of roles’,” she says. “The way I get around that is I get political and do it because it’s really important that you do it without vanity and shame. To represent the women that you see around you and do it with joy.”
Just when expectations around women’s appearance on screen seemed to be easing, Robyn fears the pressure is returning. She recently learned that an actress she greatly admires was told to lose weight by female producers. “She’s gorgeous and has an amazing body, and I was horrified to hear that,” she says. “That just should not be happening now, and I worry that that’s where we’re heading, so it’s really important for those of us who are managing a career without [losing weight] to be quite noisy about it and to really push back because it’s just feeding into a very vulnerable part of the female psyche. I think it’s a Faustian pact and it’s dangerous.”
Robyn also feels it is her responsibility to firmly sit in the age that she is, and quotes Fran Lebowitz who famously said: “You can say you’re however old you want to say, but your body knows how old you are… You don’t look younger; you just look surgical.”
“And I think that is true,” says Robyn. “I’ve been 23. I had that moment. That’s not my moment anymore. That’s the 23-year-old’s moment. That’s their space. My space is as a 61-year-old woman, and I inhabit that space so that they can inhabit theirs. It’s not my role to try and elbow my way back into other generations, and it’s really important for these girls that I’m my age and that I can show them that this is a really good time in life. If I’m showing them that I do not want to be here and I’m kicking and screaming and spending my mortgage money trying to get back to that, what’s the message that I’m giving them? I feel that not only is it my responsibility to firmly sit in the age that I am, it’s also my responsibility to own it.”
She does that by pushing back on delivering demeaning cliché lines or making jokes about being old. It has also influenced the roles she chooses, and she won’t play a stereotype because she “doesn’t know any middle-aged women who are stereotypes of middle-aged women”.
“I’m going to represent the women that I see around me. They’re fit, healthy, sexy, confident and relaxed in their bodies. They’re not people-pleasers anymore. They’ve a fierceness about them that they didn’t have when they were 40. They don’t care so much. Some of them don’t care at all, which is kind of amazing. This is what you’ve got to look forward to, not the other way around.”
Weight-loss drugs are most definitely off the menu for the mostly vegetarian – she’s a vegetarian who also eats lots of oysters. “I’m hearing from doctors all over the place that we’re going to have an epidemic of osteoporosis in a couple of decades, unless you manage it with all the things that those of us who are not taking weight-loss drugs try and do, which is eat healthily, eat well, not too much, mostly plants, and exercise.
“In my industry, in particular, everyone’s getting really, really skinny. And there’s this gaunt look. And I’ll be f…ed if I’m going to buy into that.”
As someone who once grappled with an eating disorder, Robyn is now filled with gratitude for her body, which has not only worked hard for her for 61 years, but also let her carry “two amazing beings” – sons Charlie and Pete.
She admits she took her health for granted when she was younger. A “theatre baby”, she smoked and drank a lot in her 20s and 30s and was more focused on weight-loss than fitness. “My own relationship with my body was not a good one, and of course I chose a horrendous profession for that,” she says, laughing.
“I always did some form of exercise and so I was reasonably fit, and I started doing yoga. I used to do warrior pose with a cigarette. Yoga instructors would have melted down if they knew.”
Robyn gave up smoking and drinking when she was trying to get pregnant, and when the boys came along her focus changed and her diet became better. However, juggling breastfeeding and motherhood through the filming of the second season of Outrageous Fortune, while also going through a divorce, was hugely stressful. Somehow, she managed to fit in three Pilates sessions a week, which made her physically strong, and she believes this helped her mental load.
“I remember going to the gym once and these young men were freaking out because I was doing a six-minute plank, and they were like, ‘What the hell?’ It was the physical strength that I think gave me the mental strength to get through it.”
During perimenopause and menopause she focused on her mental wellbeing, which took a huge hit. HRT not only helped get her through, but proved to be “a game-changer”.
Now it really matters to her to try and be as healthy as she can. She had Charlie when she was 39 and Pete when she was 40, and wants to be around for them and any grandchildren.
Charlie, an actor and personal trainer, has put together a 20-minute weights routine, which she follows daily. She also keeps fit by walking her dogs, mowing the lawns, gardening, swimming in the sea, Pilates when she can and generally keeping active. She eats well and prioritises sleep – “I love my bed” – and she always makes sure she has a good pillow wherever she lays her head.
And when nobody is watching, she’ll put on headphones and dance. “I tend to only do this when I’m away because it would embarrass my sons, but I’ll have a dance party by myself for 40 minutes and I’ll get such a sweat up and I absolutely love that,” she says.
This year Robyn will be spending a lot more time in the UK, with her partner, Scottish actor Peter Mullan, where she also has some work lined up. Her latest role is in a Scottish-Australian thriller, but she can’t say more than that.
She and Dianne Taylor, Robyn’s co-creator on After The Party, are also working on a couple of projects and she’s making a documentary about menopause with the same people she made You, Me & Anxiety with.
In between jobs it takes time to recalibrate. “Coming off a job is a complete reset, particularly because you’re in a very specific headspace being inside a character and their story, and it literally disappears overnight,” she explains. “You’re not just coming home from work, you’re stepping out of one reality into another one. It usually takes me a week, but what’s great is I’ve got two dogs, a cat and a tropical garden who are all more demanding than the boys ever were!”