![Jenny Agutter revealed that part of her is ‘too squeamish’ to go through plastic surgery](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2022/01/13/TELEMMGLPICT000181596183_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRo0U4xU-30oDveS4pXV-Vv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
‘Don’t hide your age with facelifts’: Jenny Agutter gets under the skin of ‘self-obsessed’ actors
Celebrities should pay tribute to the years they go through and feel good in their skin, says the Railway Children and Call The Midwife star
![Jenny Agutter revealed that part of her is ‘too squeamish’ to go through plastic surgery](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2022/01/13/TELEMMGLPICT000181596183_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRo0U4xU-30oDveS4pXV-Vv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Jenny Agutter has urged “self-obsessed” actors not to use cosmetic surgery to hide their age.
The 69-year-old star of BBC’s Call the Midwife said she was “horrified” at the way actors in America “are trying to keep their age away by doing all sorts of things”.
Ms Agutter, who rose to fame as Bobbie Waterbury in The Railway Children more than 50 years ago, said that the US was far more “image and age conscious” about its actors than UK audiences were.
“Day to day, I don’t worry about make-up and I’ve had Covid hair like everybody else, where I’ve had to cut it myself,” she told Woman’s Weekly magazine.
She added: “Mine is a self-obsessed profession. But I think in Europe, generally, there is a different view of it compared to America, whereby it’s much more image – and age – conscious. Consequently, people are trying to keep their age away by doing all sorts of things.
“Part of me is too squeamish to do any of that, and part of me thinks that actually one should be paying tribute to the years you go through.”
![Jenny Agutter through the years, in The Railway Children in 1970 and the latest series of Call The Midwife](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2022/01/13/ss-2022-1-13-19-6_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqsT8WkHhIIGcqf-eU4anH8bkcnEMN6jgniYeqwz6a86k.png?imwidth=350)
She has previously urged people to “enjoy” the signs of ageing, telling Good Housekeeping in 2019: “I have lines, lots of them but do you know what, I don’t mind. We should all enjoy every line we’ve got on our faces, because we’ve earned each one.”
Calling her 60s “liberating”, she said: “Sixty was such a defining line for me, it seems to put you in an ‘older’ phase of your life. Then it happened, and I thought ‘Just forget it’. I’ve found a kind of freedom in my 60s. I feel liberated.”
She added: “I’ve started to forget about having to be a certain way, having to make up for the fact that there’s a hell of a lot of stuff I don’t know and I’m enjoying life instead. I’m getting on and doing the stuff I want to do.”
In an interview with The Telegraph in 2018, Ms Agutter said that being associated with The Railway Children all her life has never bothered her.
“It might have done if it had stopped me getting on with other work, but it’s kind of amusing to be in one’s 60s and to be thought of as 16.”