Brad Pitt, at the age of 55, explained his decision to do less acting and focus on producing. “Overall it’s a younger man’s game,” he said. “The game itself, it’ll move on. There will be a natural selection.”

Three years later he appears to have been wrong. From Daniel Craig, 54, in his swansong as James Bond to Tom Cruise, 60, belying his years in Top Gun: Maverick, leading actors and actresses in the most popular films are much older now than in the past 40 years.

In the 1980s the average age of film stars was 37.7, according to an analysis on the website IMDb — and it remained more or less the same for two decades. Yet since the mid-2000s the average