Although it's a pretty rubbish deception. Some of them are about 30.

in St. Trinian's II - The Legend of Fritton's Gold.
She was twenty eight.

was 18 when she did Hard Candy.

Olivia Newton John was 30
Stockard Channing a whopping 34.

were nearer 30 than 15.

was 30 at the time.

Dustin Hoffman was only 6 years younger than Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft).

the two main characters, played by Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley, are supposed to be teengaers of about the same age. Parminder Nagra is ten years older than Keira Knightley.

My old flatmate used to religiously watch Dawson's Creek on Sundays. The characters were supposed to be high-school students, but the bloke playing Dawson — in the later seasons — was easily about 25.

who had a full beard in the first year (now Year 7) - long sideburns etc. He was bigger than the rest of us too, but a bit dim. Now I see my kids of that age, I suspect he was 14 and held down earlier in his education...

The actor who played Nate was only 11 years the junior of the actress who played his mother.

A British comic entertainer born in 1921 He never grew any taller than 4 feet 3 inches, and could easily pass for an 11-year-old boy, the character he played in The Clitheroe Kid, even when the series ended in 1972 .He never married, and lived quietly with his mother in Blackpool. He died from an overdose of sleeping pills on the day of her funeral, aged 51.

Don't suppose this counts as nobody was actually decieved.

Bryan Adams was 10.

Everyone on American TV seemed to own an extremely nice car by the time they were about 14, and everyone, even if they were supposed to be working class (like in 'Rosanne') owned a vast home.

Conversely, on 'Coronation Street', say right up until around the late 90s, it was worth bulding an entire storyline around the fact a character had bought a car, or went on the ferry to France for a weekend. I remember a storyline wherein Ken Barlow was about to lose his 2up 2down terrace because he couldn't afford the mortgage, despite the fact he was the headmaster of a school at the time. Jack and Vera won about 8000 quid on the lottery and decided they could afford to retire.

Says somethng about relative attitudes to class, I guess.

Wen you watch 70s UK shows like 'The Sweeney' and realize that the grizzled, boozy, pastry-complected old lags who starred in them were all about 28 at the time.

Dick Van Dyke was actually a year older than Lionel Jeffries, who was playing his father.

If you really want to be shocked by people's ages though, dig out your old Panini sticker books from the 1970's and look at some of the Scottish players. They all looked about 50, despite being in their early 20's.

The recent remake of "The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3" was fairly lambasted for featuring young & sexy John Travolta & Denzel Washington in the roles originally played by grizzled old-timers Robert Shaw & Walter Matthau, whereas (and you're ahead of me here) the new boys were actually the same age or older when the films were made...

And I remember that during some strike of other, while Cliff Richard was in the charts, great play was made of the fact that "Peter Pan Of Pop" Cliff and apparently ancient NUR/RMT General Secretary at the time Jimmy Knapp were in fact born within a fortnight of each other...

Hollyoaks

And of course, the biggest offender in history, Please Sir!

is actually seventy two years old.

Sean Connery is 12 years older than Harrison Ford. I suppose technically he could be his Dad but seems unlikely he would have missed Junior's childhood because he was on archaeological digs at age 14 - unless they were school trips I suppose.

Mark Lester (now an osteopath in Cheltenham, fact fans!) did not sing his songs - Who Will Buy, Where Is Love etc. - in the film, "Oliver!". They were sung by Kathe Green, the daughter of the film's musical director Johnny Green. Kathe was a bit of a wild one at the time and allegedly lubricated the old larnyx with hefty quantities of Calvados during the Oliver sessions. She used to run around with Richard Harris, who came up with the title for her 1969 album "Run The Length Of Your Wildness". The album, produced by the great Wayne Bickerton for Deram, is of a similar stripe to the Richard Harris/Jim Webb albums of the time and is an absolute belter (if you like that sort of thing). Total flop, of course, but recently reissued on Revola.

Manchurian Candidate (the superb and actually quite distressing original)

She was his mother. She was only 3 years older than him in real life.

must be 20 years ago, who managed to pass himself off as a teenager and attended his local high school. I think he was about 35.

Any of the Scottish massive remember that?

is 64.The same age as his/her Husband/Dad

According to bloggers in Africa, Portsmouth's Nigerian striker Kanu is actually 42 years old not the 34 he claims to be.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/feb/21/nigerian-football-age-old...

Cary Grant was older than the actress who played his mother.

Young Mr Grace looked about 100 to me when I was a nipper.

Maybe Mrs Slocombe's pussy kept him young at heart.

Where Young Nehamkin is older than Old Nehamkin.

The world sometimes works in mysterious ways...

Which featured the famous line "Nancy Dell'Olio, who has been 37 for some years.."

Wikipedia states "possibly born 23 August 1961; some sources suggest 1960, others suggest 1958[2], Dell'Olio claims 1964 in her autobiography, and during an interview with Piers Morgan in the 2008 BBC TV programme "The Dark Side Of Fame", she claimed 1783"

Why Trevor Nunn would dump the eternally scrumptious saucepot Imogen "Collar And Cuffs Don't Match" Stubbs for the over-Botoxed Italian trout is beyond me.

...were all supposed to be about 18.

I'm sure one was about 30 at the time.

Someone above mentioned African footballers. Believe it or not, Scotland once got to the final of a major football competition. I can't remember the details but methinks it might have been an under 18/21 type thing. In the final they played an African or Middle Eastern nation and got humped....I don't think birth certificates had been checked properly.

regardless of how often I try to persuade her otherwise and with whatever evidence I can put my hands on, swears blind that Wilfrid Brambell was actually YOUNGER than Harry H. Corbett. (In reality, Brambell was just less than 13 years older than the actor playing his screen son.)

I suspect the fact that Corbett died first is part of the cause of confusion. I've given up trying to correct her, particularly as she's since developed this theme to include the "fact" that Brambell appeared in "A Hard Day's Night" only because he was having a torrid affair with Brian Epstein.

She should be writing for a tabloid, she really should.

Chuckle Brother is not a brother at all but the taller ones father.

Woody Allen plays a character who is the same age as he himself would have been at the time. 48. His character has an affair with Mariel Hemingway playing a a character of her own age at the time. 17.

A little off-topic perhaps but watching the film again recently, I was struck by its absolute assurance that nothing could be awry with such a relationship and that the other characters playing his friends are entirely comfortable with the relationship and accept it as a viable non-questionable option. It is bizarre and in the light of Allen's subsequent real life relationship with his adopted daughter - more than faintly disturbing. There is an artistry at play in the film, particularly the cinematography and its use of Gershwin's music but its entirely irony free assumption that it's self-obsessed protagonist and his peer group should be freed from judgement by dint of their effortless monied liberal sophistication jars not a little a couple of decades on.

In On The Buses Reg Varney played a young Jack The Lad skirt chaser who still lived with his mum. He was 53 when the show started. Old Blakey was 20 years younger than him.

Henry Winkler, aka "the Fonz", was 32 at the height of his Happy Days fame. I know this because he said so in an interview with Bill Oddie on the Saturday morning kids' show "The Saturday Banana!". Oddie was still making a living off his wacky "Goodies" persona.

They both moaned quite sincerely about having to do stupid things for kids when they were well into their 30s. They were surrounded by children and sat beneath a giant inflatable banana.

the same age as most of the cast, give a year or two. Now if I catch a repeat show it seems, unfairly, that only I have aged fifteen years - they're all still in their late twenties.

Playing the schoolgirl Lola. As Jim Dale sings, she is "sixteen summers and a month or two". In reality she was almost 20. Disgusting. Should not be allowed. See for yourself.

I recently watched the excellent documentary series 7 Up through to 49 Up and, with the odd exception, many of the subjects looked preposterously old for their years. Lost count of the amount of times someone said: 'He's 28... 28!' etc. They all de-aged a bit after emerging from the 1980s though.
I hope The Word will do a feature on the series when 56 Up appears next year.

When The Beatles went to India and 26 when they broke, 27 when it became offical.

I was about to contribute to this thread with some dry comment about the pint-size TV star but just read up more about him and now feel slightly depressed.

Poor fella.

"What'choo talkin' about, Zanti Misfit?"

Just thought I'd save time for the next poster.

You don't know how much weight that news has lifted from my shoulders.

jim and william reid both lied heavilly in 84/5 by frequently stating their ages as 18 and 19...

was about 60, wasn't he?