Marcia Gay Harden Cover Story Marcia Gay Harden Gets Real About Menopause, Midlife Divorce & Aging

written by erika janes photographed by daniel doperalski

hroughout her career, Marcia Gay Harden has become known for playing a dizzyingly diverse array of characters, from the emotionally fragile wife of a suspected murderer in Mystic River; to the affectionate mother of sexual sadist Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey; to The Morning Show’s steely journalist Maggie Brener, who will stop at nothing to uncover juicy secrets for a tell-all book about her colleagues.

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written by galina espinoza | photographs by John russo

Heather Graham Knows What She Wants

At 65, actress is redefining who older women can be onscreen — and offscreen as well, as she thrives in her “fabulous” (and fabulously full!) single life.

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But there’s at least one role Harden has absolutely no interest in ever playing: that of a 20-year-old. Reflecting on her experience moving through midlife (“All the things they say about menopause are true — the aches and pains, the shortened temper span, the reduced libido as you grow older,” she notes), Harden says she finds it frustrating when the public conversation about menopause seems fixated on women trying to reclaim some younger version of themselves. “That just doesn’t seem to embrace what the beauty of aging is,” she explains. “It’s as if we conflate someone who admits to having reduced libido as someone who doesn’t enjoy having a good orgasm or a hot romp in the hay. No, no, no — you’re just saying your body’s different. We use these words like ‘hot,’ ‘sexy.’ Each one of those things doesn’t necessarily need to translate to how much sex you’re having. It’s a mindset of owning yourself and your body and being at ease with yourself.”

“We conflate someone who admits to having reduced libido as someone who doesn’t enjoy having a good orgasm or a hot romp in the hay. No, no, no — you’re just saying your body’s different.”

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That’s a mindset Harden, who turned 65 in August, has fully embraced. Having come through a checklist of many of the most challenging women’s health experiences — a midlife pregnancy with twins via egg donation from one of her sisters; a 15-year marriage that ended in divorce, leaving Harden struggling to feel “sane”; and caregiving for a mother with Alzheimer’s — “Marcia is in a new era right now,” her niece, actress and comedian Natalie Peyton, declares. “She is popping off! And she has never been sexier.” The same could be said of her onscreen performances, as in her most recent starring role on the CBS dramedy, So Help Me Todd, which saw Harden playing a powerhouse attorney with an enviably hot romantic life. “Marcia is fighting so hard to portray women like us as smart, sexy, sharp, sophisticated,” says her close friend, Law & Order actress Camryn Manheim. “She is really a steadfast torch carrier to have the world experience women our age as who we are now.” If Harden is comfortable standing up for herself in Hollywood, a place that’s notoriously hostile to older women, it’s due in large part to how she was raised. The daughter of a U.S. Navy officer and a mother dedicated to raising her five children, Harden grew up moving from one country to another — Germany, Greece, Japan — for her father’s career. Rather than leaving her feeling unsettled, the frequent uprooting forged a tight family bond. “My grandparents were all about tradition and unity, and that’s been instilled in us completely,” Peyton says. “Right now, the giant family chat has, like, 15 first cousins in it, and we literally use it to celebrate everybody’s wins.” Harden has certainly had her fair share of those. After graduating from college at the University of Texas at Austin, and receiving her master’s degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Harden became one of the biggest female movie stars of the 1990s thanks to movies like the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing; the children’s hit Flubber, starring Robin Williams; and Meet Joe Black, in which Harden acted alongside Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2001 for playing artist Lee Krasner in Pollock, and in 2009, took home a Best Actress Tony award for the Broadway play God of Carnage. The thought that her career might have a shelf life simply never occurred to her. “I love working!” Harden says. “I love being on set. I love getting a script. I love transforming. I love all of it.” Her latest project finds her off-camera as the co-creator and co-host (with Peyton) of a podcast called Snoriezzz that debuted last month. Designed as a sleep ritual for children, the concept was inspired by the latest science about brain health, and includes not only the reading of bedtime stories like Three Little Pigs, but also affirmations, meditation, and mindfulness offerings. There’s even a section called “CBD” that stands for “calm your body down,” which was something Harden used to say to her children when they were young and acting out. Though Snoriezzz is intended as a tool for parents to use at bedtime with their kids, Harden thinks the podcast’s focus on healthy brain habits means it has potential for older adults too, especially those in assisted living communities, or who suffer from Alzheimer’s, like her mother, Beverly, did. Harden spent close to a decade caring for Beverly; not only did she recount their relationship in the 2018 memoir, The Seasons of My Mother, but the experience also prompted Harden to become a dedicated Alzheimer’s advocate. Still, nearly six years after her mother’s death, Harden feels she could have done more. “I wish I’d had more time to do things the right way, in the early stages, before she understood her disease,” says Harden. “But by the time you’re in your own life, you’re going full steam ahead with barely enough time to take care of yourself or your kids, much less your parents. So it’s a tough moment to be in.” Harden hopes that if her children are ever in the position of having to care for her, she can make things easier by organizing her papers and personal items so that no one “has to go through it all and figure out, ‘Is this important? Is this important?’” She also has told them not to make any commitments right now about what they will and won’t do for her. “I always say to them, ‘Don’t ever promise me that you won’t put me in an assisted living facility — because you may have to do that, and I don’t want you you to feel guilty.’” The learnings from her time as Beverly’s caregiver extend to how she now takes care of her own brain health. Harden says she has had to fight her inclination toward “laziness” and prioritize walking outside for at least 30 minutes a day. With homes in both Los Angeles and upstate New York, Harden also pursues a slew of brain-building activities. She’s a dedicated ceramicist who has been known to gift friends sets of her pottery, as well as an active gardener who “bakes pies, and makes salads from these things she grows on her land,” Manheim says. To wind down, Harden reads or listens to calming music. “My kids always laugh because they know Mom’s ready to go to bed when I say, ‘Okay, Google. Play sleep music,’ and then binaural beats fill the house,” she says. “But I do also like a glass of wine at night — I’ll admit that!” Harden will also admit that achieving her current level of peace and contentment has been hard-won. Her 2012 divorce from her husband, Thaddeus Scheel, was the kind of experience that can be, “very traumatic,” she says. “It’s not, ‘Oh, don’t let the barn door hit you in the butt on the way out.’ It’s emotional. It’s your whole identity — what your dreams were, how you imagined your future — and that’s all just been shattered.” Harden’s family was there to help her pick up the pieces. “Me and my sisters lived with her and would help with the kids,” Peyton recalls. Friends, too, stepped up; in particular, Harden credits Manheim with holding her “to be accountable to myself, and to my children, as a sane person.” For her part, Manheim says she’s in awe at how Harden has been able to not only survive the ordeal, but thrive. “At the time, it felt like the world was coming to an end,” Manheim says. “But Marcia worked harder than anyone I know to rectify it for herself, for her children and for her ex. She really moves towards joy, and while there are roadblocks in the way that are so frustrating and painful, she is like a hurdler. She jumps over them.” Harden has taken a similar approach when advocating for her children — Eulie, 26, a welder; and twins Hudson, a musical theater performer, and Julitta, a design student, both 20 — each of whom identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. While she has faced online trolling for supporting her kids, Harden says that in the same way she tunes out critics, she tunes out the haters. “The number one most important thing a parent has to know about their kids,” Harden says, “is, I don’t control you. It’s your life. You need to be happy with your life — just come home for Thanksgiving!” To her friends, this kind of unconditional support comes as no surprise. “She is a mama bear like no one I’ve ever encountered in my life,” says her longtime friend, writer/director Nancy Hower. Adds Manheim: “Marcia was very quick to see how your children shine so much more brightly when they live in their truth. She let her children fly, and they have all thrived because of it.” Harden had to fight just to become a mother of three. She had Eulie when she was 39 — and six years later, at the age of 45, she gave birth to her twins, but only after her younger sister agreed to be her egg donor. Reflecting on what she went through to create her family, Harden sees it as emblematic of how the scientific community fails when it comes to women’s health. “Just because they were making all these wonderful discoveries in reproductive possibilities, they sort of made everyone forget there’s a time limit,” she says. “All of the world was talking about how you could have children [later in life]. They should have been asking me about perimenopause, and if my eggs were viable.” But Harden has seen how the conversation around women’s health, particularly menopause, is changing — and she couldn’t be more thrilled. “I love that women are talking about this and exploring it and demanding attention be paid to the subject,” she says. “And I hope women are just feeling really good about themselves.” As for when Harden feels her best, it depends on who you ask — and how you phrase the question. “There’s different kinds of ‘best,’” she points out. “My kids will say, ‘Mom feels her most powerful when she’s driving,’ because I do like being behind the steering wheel. But then sometimes I look at a beautiful text my kids sent me and I just feel this moment of contentment come over me.” She also finds joy spending time with her friends, whether it’s taking “girls’ trips,” like a recent one to Catalina Island off the coast of southern California, or just hanging out. “We act like girls at a slumber party!” Manheim says, noting that Harden is often the most outrageous of the bunch. “She presents as Martha Stewart, but she’s really a down-home Texas girl with a wicked sense of humor.” Having crafted what she calls a “fabulous” — and fabulously full — life as an independent, single woman, Harden says she isn’t thinking about finding a partner right now. “I love being free,” she explains. “I love pursuing what I want to do. I like not having to weigh in with someone, and go, ‘Well, what is your opinion about blah, blah, blah?’ I like being in the world of going places with fabulous girlfriends, and pursuing new work that I want to do without having to feel guilty that I’m not sitting on the couch watching the television show at night. And I like not sharing my closet or my sink with anybody!” Even if she did find someone she could see sharing a committed relationship with, “I don’t think I’m interested in marrying,” she says. “It doesn’t feel necessary.” These days, Harden is just as satisfied curled up with a good book (two of her all-time faves: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See) in front of a fireplace. “There’s something about that hearth and the warmth of it, and the smell of smoke,” she says, letting out a deep sigh. “It takes the cake!”

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How Marcia Gay Harden Flipped the Midlife Script

moving toward joy

i love being free

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“We use these words like ‘hot,’ ‘sexy.’ Each one of those things doesn’t necessarily need to translate to how much sex you’re having. It’s a mindset of owning yourself and your body and being at ease with yourself.”

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