Jennifer Beals: ‘Flashdance’ Star Stunning At 50, Looks Decades Younger
Jennifer Beals is famous for her role in the 1980s hit movie Flashdance, but the 50-year-old looks like she hasn’t aged a day since the movie was released more than 30 years ago.
Beals stepped out this week to promote her new role on the supernatural drama Proof, showing off her astonishingly youthful looks. Her appearance set off social networks and comment threads, with many commenters noting that Beals seemed to have found a secret of stopping time.
The new show gives Jennifer Beals a chance to live up to the Hollywood potential she never chose to pursue. After the 1983 hit Flashdance, in which she played a steel mill worker with dreams of becoming a professional dancer, Beals was seen as one of Hollywood’s biggest up-and-coming stars.
Producer and director Joel Schumacher saw the potential, offering Beals a role in the movie St. Elmo’s Fire, which could have cemented her in the “Brat Pack” that included Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, and Judd Nelson.
But Jennifer Beals turned the role down, opting instead to complete her American Literature degree from Yale.
Beals resumed her career after graduating, appearing in Devil In A Blue Dress and Four Rooms, but never regained the potential she once held.
She had a chance to kick-start her comeback sooner, with producers of Dancing With The Stars making a hard push to have her appear, but Beals turned them down.
“I am not a dancer,” she said. “They asked me and I said ‘no’. You could back up a truck to my door filled with cash and I wouldn’t do it.”
Jennifer Beals has not been gone entirely, however. The actress has managed to appear in more than 50 films, and earned both a Golden Globe nomination and an NAACP Image Award for her Bette Porter on Showtime’s The L Word.
Because it’s been awhile and because I want to get @_melsroom off the hook. #selfiebobelfie pic.twitter.com/VFi8LJ6JrO
— Jennifer Beals (@jenniferbeals) February 6, 2014
In Proof, the ageless Jennifer Beals will play Dr. Kathryn Russo, who was described by Deadline as “a skeptical, hard-science, brilliant female surgeon with a caustic edge who has been struggling with the devastating loss of her teenage son and a growing estrangement from her surviving daughter.”
The show is produced by Kyra Sedgwick and shows Dr. Russo as she investigates strange phenomena pointing toward the possible existence of an afterlife.
Jennifer Beals has more planned for her Hollywood comeback. She also signed on to join the cast of Matthew Modine’s coming-of-age film The Rocking Horsemen.
