The Body of the Year is the Crone of the Week

It’s been a long time (over a year) since I nominated a Crone of the Week, but when a 66-year-old woman is named  “Body of the Year”  over supermodels like Elle MacPherson, not to mention Jennifer Lopez and Pippa Middleton, then “A Rolling Crone” has to take notice.

The poll of 2,000 men and women was conducted by the L.A. Fitness club chain.  Helen Mirren won with 17.5 per cent of the vote.  MacPherson, 48, came in second with 10 per cent.

 It’s hard not to hate Helen Mirren for looking so good in a bathing suit.  The instinctive reaction is, “Well, she probably has a personal trainer  who comes in every day”. But the actress who has played three queens, and can look like an elderly frump as well as a hot pin-up girl, says she stays fit by exercising every day by herself with her WII.

“You can hula, jog, yoga, step – all in one session,” she told the Daily Mail of London. “You need never get bored, as every day you can tailor a new workout. It challenges you and you do it at home, so nobody need see you in those old yoga pants and torn T-shirt.”

(For fellow crones who are as technically ignorant as I am, a WII or more properly wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo in 2006.)

 Helen Mirren is a brilliant role model for all of us over-sixties.   She’s intelligent, dignified (usually) and a hugely successful career woman (Golden Globe, Oscar for  “The Queen”, a house full of other prizes).  And she has abs to die for.

I don’t imagine that any amount of exercise could get me abs like that, but Helen Mirren has inspired me to turn my single weekly Pilates session into two and –as soon as I get back from Miami, where I’m going on Friday in anticipation of welcoming my first grandchild into the world—I vow to sign up yet again with Weight Watchers to try to shed that extra ten pounds, which has somehow turned into an extra fifteen pounds. (Thinking of the heat in Miami I pulled out some shorts from years ago, tried to put them on and promptly tossed them into the pile for Goodwill.) 

Another thing I love about Helen Mirren is that she lets her wrinkles show.