When Diane Keaton’s character goes to her doctor with symptoms of menopause in the 1995 sequel to Father of the Bride, she’s supposed to be around 45 years old. It turns out that, surprise, she’s actually just pregnant—at the exact same time as her 25-year-old daughter. And thus a classic rom-com is born. Dressed in a string of pearls, a beige skirt suit, and a chin-length, graying bob, Keaton listens as her husband, played by Steve Martin, panics: “Between us, we are almost 100 years old. We’re gonna be in our 50s when our baby is in preschool!”
According to Hollywood lore, it took a lot of persuading to convince Keaton to sign up for the second film. She was 49 by the time filming started, and she thought the idea of her character being pregnant at that age was too ridiculous for any audience to buy. Keaton agreed only after being begged by Nancy Meyers, the co-writer and producer, but there was a backup plan just in case: They would write her character out through a messy divorce and have Steve Martin marry and impregnate a much younger woman. Maybe Diane Keaton took the role just to save us from the alternate-universe, midlife crisis plotline that would’ve made Martin look like a total schmuck.
In the decades since the movie, as the average age of a woman’s first birth steadily increased from 21.4 in 1970 to 27.5 in 2023, we have adjusted our eyes to a new kind of mother. Kourtney Kardashian delivered her fourth child at 44 without a single wrinkle in sight; Jennifer Meyer had her third at 49; Halle Berry had her second at 46 while looking considerably better than I do at 28; and Hilary Swank gave birth to her first and only child at 48 (Swank told ABC News that she didn’t “actively wait [to get pregnant] until” then, and that she “would have had kids earlier,” if she could). It is probably more jarring nowadays to hear about a 20-year-old getting knocked up than a 40-year-old. In my local prenatal yoga class, I am the only woman in her 20s—or even 30s.
