When Diane Keaton\u2019s character goes to her doctor with symptoms of menopause in the 1995 sequel to Father of the Bride, she\u2019s supposed to be around 45 years old. It turns out that, surprise, she\u2019s actually just pregnant\u2014at the exact same time as her 25-year-old daughter. And thus a classic rom-com is born. Dressed in a string of pearls, a beige skirt suit, and a chin-length, graying bob, Keaton listens as her husband, played by Steve Martin, panics: \u201cBetween us, we are almost 100 years old. We\u2019re gonna be in our 50s when our baby is in preschool!\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Hollywood lore, it took a lot of persuading to convince Keaton to sign up for the second film. She was 49 by the time filming started, and she thought the idea of her character being pregnant at that age was too ridiculous for any audience to buy. Keaton agreed only after being begged by Nancy Meyers, the co-writer and producer, but there was a backup plan just in case: They would write her character out through a messy divorce and have Steve Martin marry and impregnate a much younger woman. Maybe Diane Keaton took the role just to save us from the alternate-universe, midlife crisis plotline that would\u2019ve made Martin look like a total schmuck.<\/p>\n
In the decades since the movie, as the average age of a woman\u2019s first birth steadily increased from 21.4 in 1970<\/a> to 27.5 in 2023<\/a>, we have adjusted our eyes to a new kind of mother. Kourtney Kardashian delivered her fourth child at 44 without a single wrinkle in sight; Jennifer Meyer had her third at 49; Halle Berry had her second at 46 while looking considerably better than I do at 28; and Hilary Swank gave birth to her first and only child at 48 (Swank told ABC News<\/a> that she didn\u2019t \u201cactively wait [to get pregnant] until\u201d then, and that she \u201cwould have had kids earlier,\u201d if she could). It is probably more jarring nowadays to hear about a 20-year-old getting knocked up than a 40-year-old. In my local prenatal yoga class, I am the only woman in her 20s\u2014or even 30s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Diane Keaton\u2019s character goes to her doctor with symptoms of menopause in the 1995 sequel to Father…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":755532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-755531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/755532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}