"It's a fact," Penelope Ann Miller conceded when HuffPost Live asked her about the lack of enticing roles for middle-aged female actresses in Hollywood.
"I'm getting mother roles -- or not getting mother roles, but [those are] the roles that there's interest for me for -- it's not the girlfriend roles," she told host Ricky Camilleri on Monday, "which is okay. I don't need to play the ingenue anymore."
The "American Crime" star remembers being cast opposite Al Pacino, then 24 years her senior, in the 1993 film "Carlito's Way," foreshadowing the ageist dichotomy that now afflicts her at age 51.
"I'm the woman who's saying, 'Of course it's going to be the young up-and-coming actress against the older actor, and yeah, it sucks!'" she admitted. "It sucks. I do find that it's frustrating."
Luckily the actress' ABC series has won rave reviews from critics, and it offers her a chance to play a stirring three-dimensional character.
"The great thing about television, I gotta say, is that there are really good roles for actresses of my age," she said. "[But] you just have to keep working, and that's the thing. My agents just have to remind me that you just gotta go where there's good parts and you just have to kind of get your ego out of the way."
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