Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan in Lawman. Ryan was four years older than Lancaster. One’s had a facelift, the other hasn’t. And Burt in this film is the same age as Tom Cruise, so the technology has improved.
Adrian Garvey has reminded me that male facelifts are much less commented on than female. Gary Cooper is the only star of the classic period whose facelift was noticed and much commented on, as you can see below, courtesy of Adrian:
The facelifts made him lose that bit of alquiline tilt at the tip of the nose that added to his gorgeousness as a young man.It’s a tiny thing, and seen only on side angles, but it has an effect.
José Arroyo
I wonder if it’s because Cooper’s “beauty” was such a THING in his day. I’ve seen the point made numerous times in reading about Cooper that particularly early in his career, they sometimes had a tendency to film and photograph him in a similar way as they did the female stars. So it’s interesting that 25 years later when he’s in his mid 50s it reared it’s head again, most male stars got a pass on their facelifts but his got mentioned and critiqued, like the ladies, long after he’d ceased to be a “pretty boy”.
I think you´re right. If he hadn´t been so beautiful, and his beauty made so much of, earlier in his career, nobody would have noticed, like with Wayne, or indeed Lancaster.