Naomi Watts was 36 when she experienced a turn in her acting career after receiving an Oscar nomination for 21 Grams in 2004. She was also in menopause.
“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. 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, now 56, writes in an excerpt from her new book, Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause, published by The Sunday Times on Friday, January 10.
The King Kong star goes on to explain that she got her start in Hollywood later than she had originally planned, and was trying to have a baby with her then-partner Liev Schreiber when doctors told her she had entered early menopause.
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“I almost fell off the examination table,” she writes in the book, out January 21. “‘What do you mean?’ I said, gasping for air. ‘Close to menopause? That’s for grandmothers. I’m not even a mother yet. And, by the way, that’s what I’m here for, to become a mother. Take it back!’ I was trying to joke, but really I was begging him to make it not be true. I was so scared that this would be the end of my dream to bear children.”
Watts and ex Schreiber, 57, eventually welcomed children Sasha, 17, and Kai, 16, but the news of her early onset menopause affected the actress — both physically and mentally — for years.
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“As I sat there stunned and full of self-recrimination, I remembered that my mother had once mentioned she’d hit menopause at 45 — but 45 still felt very far away from 36. And, frankly, I didn’t even really know what menopause meant — except very likely the conclusion of my acting career, which got under way far later than most,” she says. “When I’d hit my early thirties, people had started telling me that the time would soon come when I wouldn’t be able to play a leading lady any more. Was this the end that had been foretold?”
Watts has since starred in acclaimed films such as The Impossible (2012) and Birdman (2014) and booked notable roles in TV series like Gyspy (2017), The Watcher (2022) and Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (2024). But she insists it’s likely due to actresses finding the drive to stand up for themselves in an industry that has historically and notoriously demonized or excluded older women.
“I’ve come to realise that we women can assert ourselves. I’ve also come to believe that there is nothing sexier than a woman who knows what she wants,” Watts writes in her book. “All good relationships at work and at home — and at the doctor’s office — require communication.”
Now, she’s a spokeswoman for older actresses who also fear menopause will halt their careers. “I was craving information on menopause, and certainly no one in Hollywood was breathing a word about it,” she writes. “We were all behaving as if between the seductress years and the grandmother roles, women just… I don’t know, vanished?”
She continues: “I’ve always shied away from jumping on the soapbox. But the menopause conversation requires us to get honest, loud and, dare I say it, even a little unladylike,” she says. “One of the funniest things that’s happened as a result: random celebrities now text me regularly to tell me they’re in menopause. It’s like I’m behind the confessional window or I’m Hollywood’s agony aunt. But I enjoy it.”
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Watts founded her company, Stripes Beauty, in October 2022 “to address various practical needs of women my age” — including being intimate. She opens up about how her budding relationship with now husband Billy Crudup changed her perspective on aging and sex in her book.
“I was able to share with him honestly what I was experiencing even though it didn’t match with what I thought was appropriate for a sexy new girlfriend,” Watts writes, admitting she and Crudup, 56, discussed her hormone patches and the “grey hairs on [his] balls.”
“He was compassionate, not squeamish or awkward,” Watts shares of her Gypsy costar, whom she married in 2023. “That was a great gift. My hormone patches never got in the way of sex again.”
Us Weekly
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