How The Dig is just the latest example of Hollywood ignoring older actresses

Mutton dressed as lamb’ was the phrase fierce grannies would mutter when middle-aged women dared to dress younger than their years, shunning the attire expected of them in favour of girlish clothes.

Funny, then, that on screen nowadays we are more often than not faced with the exact opposite — lambs dressed as mutton. Or playing it, at least.

Beautiful young, fresh-faced women, cast as characters sometimes decades older than them because, presumably, a correctly aged actress wouldn’t be as pleasing on the eye.

The latest film to shoehorn a lovely young actress into a much older role is The Dig, a Netflix creation charming viewers with its mix of Anglo-Saxon history and sweeping Suffolk landscape — the soothing balm we need in our recent troublesome history.

But just when you thought a dramatised version of the famous archaeological dig that took place at Sutton Hoo on the eve of World War II would be a relatively gentle topic for entertainment — notwithstanding mild irritation at the usual bleats from scholars about historical accuracy — that age-old riddle has yet again raised its head.

Why is the main character played by an actress who is a full 20 years younger than the woman she is trying to depict?

In this case, it is the talented Carey Mulligan, 35, playing the part of landowner Edith Pretty, 56.

Carey is a fine actress — but you have to wonder whether anybody considered finding a star nearer the character’s real age? Does any casting director? They do exist, after all.

Not only are most actresses depicting middle-aged women younger in reality but they are mostly chosen for looking even younger than they actually are — Carey is a fine example.

It is worth noting that Ralph Fiennes, 58, plays excavator Basil Brown, whose age at the time of the dig was 51.

But then there has always been a different rule for the boys.

Carey is just the latest in a long line of actresses cast in roles way beyond their years. Keira Knightley, at the dewy age of 32, played French novelist Colette, who was a pretty battered 47 at the time the 2018 film of the same name was set. A radiant

Elizabeth Debicki, then 28, portrayed Bloomsbury icon Virginia Woolf — a full two decades her senior — in Vita & Virginia, also in 2018. You only need to briefly glance at a picture of the formidable Woolf in her 40s to reveal she could almost be Debicki’s granny.

As for the box-fresh Tilda Swinton as the Soho-haunting Muriel Belcher in 1998’s Love Is The Devil, it’s…