I'm always puzzled when people attack age gaps as somehow wrong. What some do is to confuse the issue of age gap with the issue of a man leaving his comparably aged wife for someone younger. I can understand objetions to that.
But in this case - and in many others - the man simply didn't marry at ALL until he was older - so what right has anyone to say that he shouldn't marry someone much younger who is of, as you say, "legal age"? Obviously, it's up to them.
By the way, I think much of the age gap thing in the 1950s was really just Hollywood economics.
Many of the older female stars who had made big names in the 1930s, had decided to slow their careers down due to marriage and children (not all by any means, but many) - Irene Dunne and Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert and Vivien Leigh, Jeanette MacDonald and Constance Bennett, Ann Harding and Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers and Paulette Goddard and Myrna Loy - all of them big stars in the 1930s - none of them big stars by the mid-1950s.
Other big female stars just had a harder time as the 1950s went on: Joan Blondell's parts kept getting smaller. Joan Crawford's pictures kept getting worse. Bette Davis actually advertised for work! Barbara Stanwyck had to reinvent herself as a western heroine. Even Katherine Hepburn had a harder time.
But the male stars just kept plowing on - and the studios felt they had invested ENORMOUSLY in their image, had publicized them, created vehicles for them for decades. So suddenly Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, Gregory Peck, William Powell, Frederic March, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Cagney, George Brent, Fred MacMurray, Robert Young, Franchot Tone, Edward G. Robinson, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart - did'nt have any natural counterparts in terms of age.
And to make them seem younger, vital, the studios decided to pair them with actresses who were much younger. Thus:
Grace Kelly opposite Gary Cooper (High Noon), Cary Grant (To Catch a Thief), Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra (High Society), Alec Guinness (The Swan), Jimmy Stewart (Rear Window), Ray Milland (Dial M for Murder), Bing Crosby again and William Holden (The Country Wife),
Audrey Hepburn opposite Gary Cooper (Love in the Afternoon), Cary Grant (Charade), Fred Astaire (Funny Face), Burt Lancaster (The Unforgiven), Gregory Peck (Roman Holiday), Humphrey Bogart and William Holden (Sabrina).
Leslie Caron opposite Fred Astaire (Daddy Longlegs), Gene Kelly (An American in Paris), Mel Ferrer (Lili), Louis Jourdan (Gigi), even Maurice Chevalier (and Horst Buchcholz) in Fanny.
Carroll Baker opposite Karl Malden and Eli Wallach in Baby Doll, Jimmy Stewart in How the West Was Won (in which she has a son - George Peppard - who is older than the actress!), Clark Gable (But Not for Me),
Sophia Loren opposite Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra in The High and the Mighty, opposite Clark Gable in It Started in Naples, Cary Grant in Houseboat.
Suzy Parker opposite Gary Cooper in Ten North Frederick, Cary Grant in Kiss Them For Me,
You could write the same of who co-starred with Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, M
Maggie McNamara, Jean Peters, Doris Day, Deborah Kerr, Cyd Charisse, Dortohy McGuire - huge age gaps throughout the 1950s.
At the beginning of the 1960s, things changed completely - and as another wrote on this thread, Hepburn was soon starring with Peter O'Toole, with Albert Finney, with her own generation!
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