Older characters have long been underrepresented on screen and in fiction. A USC Annenberg study of the top-grossing American films of 2015 found that only 11 percent of speaking characters were aged 60 or older, despite that group making up 18.5 percent of the U.S. population, and more than half of the films sampled included an ageist comment. When older characters did appear, they were rarely the focus of the work. The works below are part of a long and growing counterweight: novels and films from across several decades, written and directed with the older protagonist as the center of the story rather than the moral or emotional backdrop for someone else’s.

Books

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel is one of the great studies of self-deception, in which the protagonist’s age is inseparable from what the book is doing. Stevens, an aging English butler, takes a six-day drive through the countryside in the summer of 1956 and reckons, slowly and without ever quite naming it, with the cost of a life of devotion to the wrong things.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson (2010)

Simonson writes a comedy of manners where her two leads are among the most fully drawn older protagonists in recent fiction: a retired British army major and a widowed shopkeeper of Pakistani descent who fall into an unexpected attachment in an English village that disapproves of both of them for different reasons.

A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman (2012)

In this bestseller, Backman writes about grief without melodrama and without sentimentality, which is harder than it looks. Ove is newly widowed and methodically preparing to follow his wife, until neighbors, a stray cat, and a past that the present keeps insisting on get in his way.

The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman (2020)

Osman, a British television presenter and comedian, treats his sleuths as the sharpest and funniest people in any room they walk into, and the series has sold tens of millions of copies on the strength of exactly that. Four residents of a comfortable English retirement village meet weekly to review cold cases, until a body turns up on the grounds.

Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt (2022)

Van Pelt treats long grief as the substance of the novel rather than a detail in its margins. Tova Sullivan cleans the local aquarium at night, has done so since her teenage son disappeared decades earlier, and is the closest thing to a confidante that the aquarium’s resident giant Pacific octopus has.

The Correspondent, Virginia Evans (2025)

Evans’s debut, told entirely in correspondence, became one of the most discussed novels of 2025. Sybil Van Antwerp, seventy-three and retired from a long career as a chief clerk to a federal judge, writes letters every morning: to her brother, to old colleagues, to famous writers, and to one person she has never managed to send a letter to.

Film

The Straight Story, David Lynch (1999)

Lynch’s most uncharacteristic work and arguably his most moving, based on the true story of Alvin Straight, who drove a riding lawnmower more than two hundred miles across Iowa and Wisconsin to see his estranged brother after a stroke. Richard Farnsworth, in the last performance of his life, is extraordinary.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, John Madden (2011)

The cast carries the film: six of the most accomplished British actors of their generation, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, and Celia Imrie, are given room to do real work. They play a group of British retirees who relocate to a hotel in Jaipur that is not quite what its brochure promised.

Nebraska, Alexander Payne (2013)

Shot in black and white, this film is funny without being broad and sad without being maudlin. Bruce Dern plays Woody Grant, an aging Montana man convinced he has won a million-dollar sweepstakes and determined to drive to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim it.

The Intern, Nancy Meyers (2015)

Meyers’s film could have been an extended joke at its protagonist’s expense and is not. It treats him as competent, observant, and useful, which is most of what the audience came for. Robert De Niro plays Ben Whittaker, a widowed seventy-year-old former executive who takes a senior intern position at a Brooklyn fashion startup.

A Man Called Otto, Marc Forster (2022)

Tom Hanks stars in the American adaptation of Backman’s novel. The earlier Swedish version, A Man Called Ove (2015), starring Rolf Lassgård, is also available and was nominated for two Academy Awards.

Thelma, Josh Margolin (2024)

Margolin’s debut is, of all things, a low-key action film inspired by his own grandmother. June Squibb, 93, in the first lead role of her career, plays a grandmother who is scammed out of ten thousand dollars and sets out across Los Angeles on a motorized scooter to recover it herself.

Reading and Watching Together at The Pines

Books and film are part of the daily life of the community at The Pines at Davidson. Residents host book clubs and discussion groups, audit courses at Davidson College, and gather throughout the year for lectures, concerts, and performances at the college and on campus. The Pines sits on 150 acres in the heart of Davidson, North Carolina, and is accredited as a Level 1 Arboretum. If you’re curious about life here, we’d welcome a visit. Schedule a visit or join one of our upcoming Q&A sessions on Zoom.