Naomi Watts on 'seductress' and 'grandmother' roles for women in Hollywood

Naomi Watts was warned it would be career suicide if she made her menopause public.

Watts faced a shock when she was told at only 36 that she was menopausal. The actress was trying to conceive at the time.

In a new memoir titled Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause, the Goodnight Mommy actress has opened up about going through menopause in Hollywood.

“I was told I would never work again if I admitted to being menopausal, or even perimenopausal,” the 56-year-old writes.

She continued: “Hollywood’s lovely term for such women was ‘unf***able.’ I’d been warned ever since I started acting that calling attention to your age – when that age was not 23 or younger – would be career suicide.”

She also went on to note the perception of a menopausal woman in Hollywood.

Watts reflected: “It’s like I’m behind the confessional window or I’m Hollywood’s agony aunt. I was craving information on menopause, and certainly no one in Hollywood was breathing a word about it. We were all behaving as if between the seductress years and the grandmother roles, women just… I don’t know, vanished?”

The King Kong star discovered that she was menopausal after a visit to the doctor following years of night sweats and hot flushes.

“‘Looks like you’re close to menopause,’ my doctor told me when I was 36 and wondering why I was having so much trouble getting pregnant. I almost fell off the examination table,” she says in the book, an extract of which was published in The Times.

“‘What do you mean?’ I said, gasping for air. “Close to menopause? That’s for grandmothers. I’m not even a mother yet. And, by the way, that’s what I’m here for, to become a mother. Take it back!”’

The actress then came to the realization that there’s “nothing sexier than a woman who knows what she wants,” and decided to pen a book about the issue.

“One of the funniest things that’s happened as a result – random celebrities now text me regularly to tell me they’re in menopause,” Naomi Watts noted.