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Rachel Ward speaks out after receiving an on-slaught of online hate simply for ageing and choosing to do so naturally.
It was days before Christmas – mid-summer – and cicadas trilled in the background as actor, director and beef cattle farmer Rachel Ward posted a video to her Instagram feed thanking friends and neighbours for their support throughout the year.
No one – least of all Rachel – imagined this chatty, generous and otherwise innocuous post would attract a band of ill-mannered (and inarticulate) trolls.
‘OMG!! What the hell happened to her. Wow!! She has aged really bad.’ ‘I wish I never saw her like this!’ ‘She looks ravaged.’ And worse.
Her daughter, Matilda Brown, also an actor and food producer (at The Good Farm Shop), was incensed. She jumped to her mum’s defence and reposted the comments, calling out the idiocy of criticising a 68-year-old woman for, essentially, looking 68. “Warning!! Naturally aging woman. Proceed with caution,” she wrote and posted a series of exquisite photographs of Rachel with her grandkids, and at work on the farm.
The resulting pile-on of love is what Rachel has focused on, she says, sitting in her kitchen, enjoying a morning cuppa as she chats with The Weekly.
“Why are we giving ourselves these expectations to maintain youth, and what is perceived as attractive? It’s so great to not weigh into that anymore. Maybe if I was 40, I would mind the comments, but now I’ve so left any kind of attachment to youth and beauty behind … It doesn’t touch me because it’s not important anymore.”
Rachel let her hair colour grow out last year, against Bryan’s advice. It was a conscious decision.
“I’d been wanting to do it for a while,” she explains. “It was Bryan who was very resistant. I was just, ‘Well, you’re grey, why does it matter?’ And he was like, ‘You don’t need to go grey yet.’
“I had no idea it was going to be this white, but I like it, and my daughter cut it, so it’s her haircut. My kids like it, the grandkids don’t have a problem. and even Bryan seems to have come around to it, so there we go.”
Source: “It doesn’t touch me”, Rachel Ward is unbothered by online trolls – The Australian Women’s Weekly
Wonderful that Rachel is setting an alternative to going fake we all need choices and not to be trolled for them women deserve respect