This was the "Hollywood Wall." It was a place where experience, wisdom, and craft were deemed less valuable than a smooth forehead. Three forces converged to shatter that wall.

The 1980s and 90s offered a slight reprieve with "cougar" jokes and the odd How to Make an American Quilt , but the underlying message was toxic. A 40-year-old male lead (think Harrison Ford or Sean Connery) was routinely paired with a 25-year-old love interest. Meanwhile, actresses like Meryl Streep—goddess though she is—often admitted that after 40, the scripts dried up unless they were adaptations of Shakespeare or Proust.

For decades, the landscape of cinema and entertainment was governed by a cruel arithmetic. A male actor’s value appreciated like fine wine, while a female actress’s currency depreciated like yesterday’s newspaper the moment she found her first gray hair or a laugh line around her eyes. The narrative was relentless: youth was the sole asset, and the "ingénue" was the only archetype worth writing.

What does this mean for the young actress of tomorrow? It means she no longer has to fear the birthday. She no longer has to view 40 as a firing squad. She can look at Michelle Yeoh holding that Oscar, at Jennifer Coolidge’s triumphant second act, at Naomi Watts producing her own menopause horror film The Desperate Hour , and see not an exception, but a roadmap.

Cinema is a mirror. For most of its history, that mirror reflected only a narrow sliver of humanity: the young, the fertile, the innocent. Today, the mirror is widening. It now shows the lines of a life well-lived, the ferocity of a woman who has survived, the hunger of a woman who still dreams, and the rage of a woman who has been overlooked.