Meryl Streep's outlook on aging is the most liberating thing we've read all day

Meryl Streep wants to change the narrative on aging - the actress wants focus to be on personal achievements rather than perception of physical image.

Meryl Streep is one of a number of celebrities celebrating aging by showcasing their eye-catching grey hairstyles. While the 75-year-old icon once famously admitted to not caring less about fashion, that doesn't mean we can't admire her ability to rock a pink power suit and sheer rose lipstick - but Meryl would rather you quickly admired these and moved on to more important things.

Instead of a focus on the transient and highly subjective nature of physical beauty, Meryl wishes our youth-obsessed culture would push these traits to the bottom of the list of importance - she is clear about believing the secret of her indomitable success revolves around pushing the boundaries when it comes to challenging herself, and embracing growing older as an opportunity rather than a hindrance.

As part of the best advice you'll hear about life and growing old, Meryl says "Don’t waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world. You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you’ve lost a lot of people, you realise each day is a gift."

That's not to say the star hasn't been affected by agism - something that isn't just rife in Hollywood, but in life in general. The actress found that once she hit 40, she was frequently offered roles playing a witch, while scripts for adventurous women, love interests and complex, nuanced characters, stopped coming her way. "I wasn’t offered any female adventurers, or love interests, or heroes or demons," she said in an interview, "I was offered witches because I was considered old at 40."

Far from let this pull her down, Meryl pushed back against this narrative, and pushed back hard. This is what's now carved her out as a leader in making your own way in a male-dominated profession obsessed with how women look through their gaze. She's known to fund screenwriting courses for women 40, wo are mentored by female filmmakers. In her own words, "Improvements for underrepresented groups on camera will only truly change when Hollywood shifts away from the straight, white-male-dominated scene behind that camera."

If that's not enough to make you fall in love with the actress more than you have already, she has even more words of wisdom to really bring her powerful messages home. "Sometimes women get mixed up and think that if they’re more beautiful, they’ll be more loved; if they look better on the outside, that’s what will make them important or loveable," she says, adding, "The idea that their beauty will give them meaning in the world is wrong. We have to be very vigilant.

"Younger generations of women may not be aware of how hard it was just to get to where we are today. In the 1970s, there were very few women doctors, lawyers, and virtually no CEOs. And even today we still have a long way to go to achieve pay equality not just in Hollywood but in all professions. We should be careful not to overestimate the actual freedom of women today. Just because we have more say and we walk around in pants more than we did before, that doesn’t mean that we have left the repressive and discriminatory aspects of the 20th century behind."