From Michael Caine's 49-year gap with his love interest in The Quiet American to Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider's 27-year difference in Last Tango In Paris...the most notorious relationship age-gaps in cinema - after Jenna Ortega's new X-rated flick

An X-rated sex scene between Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman in their new movie Miller’s Girl has faced a backlash over their ‘gross’ 31-year age-gap.

Hollywood has a long history of creating couples with many years, even decades, between them – most often older men appearing to attract much younger women.

Wednesday star Ortega, 21, plays 18-year-old student Cairo Sweet in the black comedy, while British actor Freeman, 52, is cast as her teacher Jonathan Miller.

The actress was ‘sure of what she wanted to do’ for her most explicit scene and was completely supported during filming, according to the film’s intimacy co-ordinator.

Yet eyebrows have been raised before at age-gap movie romances with up to half a century between supposed on-screen lovers. 

Dr Caroline Ruddell, reader in film and TV at Brunel University London, told MailOnline: ‘It’s more common generally to see older men partnered with much younger women in a romantic heterosexual scenario on-screen.

‘This is also related to the roles female actresses have access to in the mainstream media – it is not uncommon to find older female actresses complaining there are very few roles for them once they reach a certain age, a challenge male actors do not seem to have to contend with.

‘It is not so long ago Kristin Scott Thomas played Ralph Fiennes’ lover in The English Patient in 1996 and yet in 2013 she was cast as Fiennes’ lover’s mother.

‘This is not a good look for mainstream film-making and the industry’s attitude to gender and age.’

MailOnline takes a look at some of the most striking ‘May To December’ pairings…

Miller’s Girl sees characters played by Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega – who have a 32-year age gap – getting tangled in a complex relationship

An X-rated sex scene between the pair has been branded ‘so gross’ by viewers

49 years: Michael Caine and Do Thi Hai Yen, The Quiet American (2002)

Some critics were unconvinced by the fact Michael Caine was almost five decades older than his cynical journalist character Thomas Fowler’s mistress Phuong, played by 20-year-old Do Thi Hai Yen in the 2002 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel.

Yet veteran British actor Caine was also praised for his performance which earned him his sixth Oscar nomination – this time for Best Actor, having previously won Best Supporting Actor prizes for Hannah And Her Sisters in 1986 and The Cider House Rules 13 years later.

The movie, set in the early 1950s during France’s war in Korea, co-starred future Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser as a younger man – US agent Aiden Pyle – who vies for Phuong’s affections.

Caine’s character was in his 50s in Greene’s original 1955 novel, which was first adapted as a film three years later.

That version had Fowler played by Michael Redgrave and Phuong by Italian actress Giorgia Moll, with an age difference of almost 30 years.

Michael Caine played a jaded journalist with a much younger mistress, portrayed by Do Thi Hai Yen, in 2002 film The Quiet American

Michael Caine was 49 years older than Do Thi Hai Yen, who played his mistress aged 20

The film was based on Graham Greene’s 1955 novel set in Vietnam

42 years: Tom Skerritt and Drew Barrymore, Poison Ivy (1992)

Drew Barrymore became a child star, aged just seven, in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – before struggling with alcohol and drugs.

Her 1992 erotic thriller Poison Ivy showed Barrymore playing teenager Ivy who plots to seduce her friend Sylvie’s dad Darryl – acted by Tom Skerritt, 90 now and 59 when the film was released while Barrymore was 17.

Their relationship was not meant to be seen as healthy in the movie directed by Kath Shea, who responded to criticism by saying she told production company New Line ‘it was going to be different from what they thought’.

Movie reviews site Rotten Tomatoes describes it as ‘an unpleasant thriller that lacks the self-awareness to dilute its sordid undertones’.

Barrymore, who posed nude for Interview magazine around the time of the film’s release, later had much more successful box office hits including The Wedding Singer, Charlie’s Angels and 50 First Dates.

The actress, now 48, faced flak last September and later apologised for resuming her talk show without three unionised workers during the Hollywood writers’ strike. 

Poison Ivy featured a relationship between Drew Barrymore’s teenager Ivy and Tom Skerritt playing the father of one of her friends

Tom Skerritt was 59 on the movie’s release in 1992, with Barrymore 17

Skerritt and Barrymore co-starred in the controversial erotic thriller directed by Kath Shea

39 years: Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Entrapment (1999)

Film fans were well accustomed to Sean Connery seducing younger women on screen, since he made his debut as the first on-screen James Bond in 1962’s Dr No.

Yet he threatened to stretch credulity when paired with Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1999 thriller Entrapment, whose release in 1999 came with future Sir Sean aged 68 and his on-screen lover just 29.

Scottish actor Connery’s role was as an international art thief while Wales’s Zeta-Jones was an insurance firm investor.

The film website Movieweb has suggested the movie directed by Jon Amiel ‘somehow makes us believe Catherine Zeta-Jones might sleep with Sean Connery’.

Yet OK! magazine complained about it being the latest in ‘a tummy-churning tradition of pensionable movie blokes getting paired up with beautiful babes’.

Zeta-Jones, now 54 and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner for Chicago in 2003, went on to marry fellow actor Michael Douglas – who was born precisely 25 years before her, to the day.

Connery died aged 90 in October 2020, having been married since 1975 to French-Moroccan painter Micheline Roquebrune, now 94, his second wife.

Sean Connery was 68 and screen lover Catherine Zeta-Jones 29 when Entrapment came out

Connery played an international art thief while Zeta-Jones was an insurance firm investor

Critics had mixed opinions over the couple’s 39-year age-gap

Film website Movieweb has suggested the movie directed by Jon Amiel ‘somehow makes us believe Catherine Zeta-Jones might sleep with Sean Connery

OK! magazine described the film as the latest in ‘a tummy-churning tradition of pensionable movie blokes getting paired up with beautiful babes’.

34 years: Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, Lost In Translation (2003)

The characters portrayed by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in director Sofia Coppola’s atmospheric Tokyo-set 2003 movie Lost In Translation are not seen sleeping together nor even kissing.

Yet their unlikely bond forms in a hotel where Murray’s faded and jaded film star Bob Harris is staying while filming lucrative promotions.

He befriends recent college graduate Charlotte, played by Johansson, left neglected by her celebrity photographer husband.

Murray, whose box office hits include Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, turned 52 eight days before filming began in September 2002 – with Johansson only almost 18.

Two years later, aged 20, she was paired with 34-year-old Ewan McGregor in Michael Bay-directed box office flop The Island.

The characters played by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson discover an unlikely bond in director Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost In Translation

The duo form a friendship while staying in a Tokyo hotel in the critically-acclaimed movie

Johansson had not yet turned 18 when shooting the film, while Murray had just become 52

The pair neither kiss nor have sex on screen but share emotional scenes including a farewell

34 years: Jack Nicholson and Amanda Peet, Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

Jack Nicholson has long been a well-known womaniser both on and off screen – and Nancy Meyers’ 2003 comedy-drama Something’s Gotta Give had the actor as a record company owner with a rule to only date much younger women.

He begins the film in a relationship with Marin Klein, portrayed by Amanda Peet – 34 years younger than Nicholson and just 31 when the movie was released.

The stark age-gap is emphasised on-screen – Nicholson’s character Harry Sanborn suffers a heart attack during foreplay and later marries Marin’s mother – played by Diane Keaton, a mere nine years younger than her fellow Oscar-winner.

Nicholson’s previous age-gap movies have included As Good As It Gets, where co-star Helen Hunt was 26 years younger than him.

Nicholson went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress and Hunt did so for Best Actress at the 1997 Academy Awards.

Jack Nicholson is 34 years older than Amanda Peet, his co-star in Something’s Gotta Give

The duo begin the movie as lovers before later marries her mother, played by Diane Keaton

Peet and Nicholson were paired in the comedy-drama written and directed by Nancy Meyers

Nicholson had a 26-year age-gap with Helen Hunt in 1997 comedy As Good As It Gets

Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson both won Oscars for As Good As It Gets

28 years: Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow, A Perfect Murder (1998)

Michael Douglas was 54 and Gwyneth Paltrow 26 when they were portrayed as a couple in 1998 crime thriller A Perfect Murder.

He played a business tycoon whose much younger wife – portrayed by Paltrow – has been cheating on him, prompting him to hire her lover to kill her.

The movie was based on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Dial M For Murder, where the central couple were played by Ray Milland and Grace Kelly – born 22 years apart.

A CNN review of the remake said witheringly of Douglas that he ‘should hang up his spurs when it comes to playing a romantic lead with women in their twenties’.

Douglas met his future wife Catherine Zeta-Jones while promoting A Perfect Murder at the Deauville American Film Festival in France in the year of its release.

Gwyneth Paltrow was just 26 for A Perfect Murder, to on-screen husband Michael Douglas’s 54

Douglas plays a tycoon whose wife, portrayed by Paltrow, is cheating on him

The 1998 movie was based on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Dial M For Murder

Critics highlighted what was seen as an unconvincing age difference between the two stars

Douglas’s character is shown hiring his wife’s lover in a plot to kill her

The 1998 remake followed Hitchcock’s thriller which had starred Ray Milland and Grace Kelly

27 years: Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, Last Tango In Paris (1972)

The vast age-gap between lovers played by Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider was one of many controversies about Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s notorious 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, which was given an X-rating certificate.

Brando, who had just starred in The Godfather, played a widowed American starting an anonymous sexual relationship with a much younger woman played by the French newcomer Maria Schneider, then only 19 to his 48.

The two actors promoted the film in the US by posing naked for a photospread in Playboy magazine.

But Bertolucci has been condemned in recent years after suggesting an infamous sex scene involving butter as a lubricant was not consensual and that the aim was to surprise Schneider, who died aged 58 in 2011.

Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain posted online in 2016: ‘To all the people that love this film- you’re watching a 19yr old get raped by a 48yr old man. The director planned her attack. I feel sick.’

Maria Schneider, 19, and Marlon Brando, 48, starred in 1972 erotic thriller Last Tango In Paris