Thread by @TelegraphFilm

📽️On-screen romances between old men and young women are the norm.

But in 2003, The Mother tried something different when Daniel Craig starred alongside Anne Reid, 32 years his senior.

Thread👇

telegraph.co.uk/films/0/daniel…

Examine the average age gap between James Bond and his love interests, and it’s the pattern that’s the problem.

📸LMK

🎞️This was most conspicuous in the case of the oldest offender, Roger Moore.

➡️Age gap police klaxon: Moore was 53 opposite 24-year-old Carole Bouquet in For Your Eyes Only

"It’s so wrong and so typically male," David Hare was forced to agree yesterday

But flip the genders, and suddenly everyone sits up in horror...

This was the premise of The Mother, a neglected, BBC-funded drama.

Playing a burly carpenter called Darren, Craig was 34 at the time – 32 years younger than the film’s leading lady, Anne Reid, who was 66

The role of May, a widowed grandmother who has a passionate fling with the handyman her daughter is seeing, remains the finest part of Reid’s career, which she credits for every subsequent success

➡️The crucial thing underlying The Mother is that no one seems able to ignore a heterosexual coupling when the older party is a woman

📸Rex

The very fact of the film’s controversy serves to expose our double standards, as does the shock of May’s conventional, uptight family when the affair comes to light

🎥Because cinema so very rarely privileges the sex drives of women over 40, let alone 65, Reid was extremely nervous about shooting The Mother’s sex scenes

🗣️"The night before", she said on Desert Island Discs, "I had a lot of drink on my own in the flat and I stripped and I stood in front of a mirror and thought, 'Tomorrow I’m going to have to show this'"

🔎Read more on the affair that broke cinema’s oldest taboo here 👇

telegraph.co.uk/films/0/daniel…