Fifty-year-old, New Zealander actor Russell Crowe got himself in some well-deserved hot water recently when, shortly before Christmas, he told Australia's Women's Week magazine,

"The best thing about the industry I'm in – movies – is that there are roles for people in all different stages of life," Russell says...

"To be honest, I think you'll find that the woman who is saying that (the roles have dried up) is the woman who at 40, 45, 48, still wants to play the ingénue, and can’t understand why she's not being cast as the 21 year old.

"Meryl Streep will give you 10,000 examples and arguments as to why that's bullshit, so will Helen Mirren, or whoever it happens to be. If you are willing to live in your own skin, you can work as an actor. If you are trying to pretend that you’re still the young buck when you’re my age, it just doesn’t work."

Oh dear, not again. Apparently, there is much more but you need to be a subscriber to Women's Week to read the whole interview. Doesn't matter – others have read it for us and reported back.

With the holidays and all, it took a couple of weeks for the media to react, but they're catching up now.

Last weekend, Gawker's Jezebel website led with their trademark pull-no-punches style; “Always Full of Shit Russell Crowe Says Actresses Should Act Their Age,” read the headline. Then reporter Rebecca Rose took him down for that last sentence (above) from one section of his rant.

”Funny how Crowe doesn't bother to offer any opinion about the mind boggling legacy of Hollywood men playing romantic leads to women 10,20, 30, and sometimes 40 (!!!!!) years younger than them.

"Because it's clearly the sad old women daring to pretend they are outside their actual birth ages that are ruining Hollywood.”

By Monday, the The Sydney Morning Herald had chimed in, adding Crowe to their astonishingly long list of other male celebrities who spout such deeply misogynist “sexist claptrap.”

(They never learn, do they? Men, who can be so immensely attractive for any number of good reasons, can also be such pigs.)

I caught up with the story on Tuesday when I was stuck at home all day while my denture was being refitted. (Nobody – I mean, NOBODY - gets to see me without my denture.)

By then, The Guardian had taken up cudgels against Crowe's outburst. Reporter Nosheen Iqbal noted that women in movies don't have male actors'

”...privilege of being able to grow a gut, a temper, be perma-grizzled and still get jobs. The ones who once they get past 'a certain age' (37, it’s basically 37, guys) are forced by the world’s most superficial industry to adopt that weird, waxy surgical sheen on their frozen faces.

“That, or Crowe is drowning in scripts featuring rich, varied parts for women who are 40, 45, 48 and above. Either way, off-beam and dead daft advice coming from a middle-aged man who famously threw a telephone at someone’s face because it wouldn’t work.”

Nosheen Iqbal also saved me a lot of work by telling us,

”Still, one Jezebel commenter, so annoyed by Crowe’s wilful offensiveness, researched the numbers in 2014’s 20 highest-grossing films (excluding animations) in the US and found that on average, three out of 10 actors were women – only a pathetic 8% of those actors were aged between 40 and 59, while just 2% were women over 60.”

Russell Crowe notwithstanding, we at this blog know just how scarce are the roles for old women (and old men too) especially if they are not dementia patients.

But the biggest reason I've posted this today is to show off Ms. Iqbal's sensationally clever summing up of the Crowe debacle. I'm jealous because not only had I never heard the quotation before, I'm pretty sure I would not have thought to use it if I had.

”Of course, Mirren and Streep aren’t proof that there are parts for older women,” writes Iqbal.

"They are, as that old genius crone Tina Fey routinely points out, proof that there are parts for Mirren and Streep.”

You have, Russell Crowe, been well and properly rebuked.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today: Clifford Rothband: I Wonder at It All