Celebrity Beauty: Virginia Madsen

When it comes to aging, Virginia Madsen doesn’t intend to put up a fight. She’s embracing it. “Beauty has to come from within,” she says, “You can be in the greatest gene pool in the world and still mess up if you don’t live right.”

The 44 year-old actress has been “in the business” for more than 20 years and after a slew of, um, bimbo parts in the 80s and 90s, admittedly only really began coming into her own with her Oscar-nominated role of Maya, the dumped-trophy-wife-turned-waitress in 2004’s smash hit Sideways.

“The roles a woman can play in her forties are so much more interesting, so much richer and so much more real. The roles for women in their twenties are flat by comparison. “That's when you're really a woman, when you're 40.”

Now, it’s not like the single mom to 11 year-old Jack (dad is model/actor Antonio Sabato Jr.) eschews all look good/feel good approaches. She does Pilates, hikes, skis and Boogie boards. She also works out with a 74 year-old trainer(!) Telling More magazine; “He helps me to imagine the kind of 60 or 70 year-old I want to become. To be ready for old age, you need to start becoming strong now. It’s like putting away money for retirement.”

In fact, she’s even looking to produce a documentary on aging in America with her mom that will take a look at what makes some women vivid and vivacious well into their eighties while some just seem to fade away in their sixties.

"I thought things for me would happen when I was in my 40s," she says. "I thought that when I was a little girl. And I think it's because when I watched movies with Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, I thought that they were 40. Somehow that was this magic number because they seemed like such women. Of course, they were probably about 25, right?”

"So I figured that kind of stuff would come later. And the other day I was like, wow, that's what happened."

Technorati Tags: health and wellness, skin care, celebrity

Return to RealSelf blog