In the 1930s and 40s, stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford managed to defy these tropes through sheer star power, yet even they faced brutal scrutiny. Davis famously lamented in The Star (1952) about the industry’s cruelty toward aging women, a sentiment that echoed through the decades. By the 1980s and 90s, the "Meryl Streep Exception" emerged—a belief that one or two exceptional women could survive the age cutoff, while the vast majority were retired to character acting or obscurity.