Charlotte Rampling, 65 years old and un-retouched

There aren’t many film stars who, entering their golden years, endure as icons of sensuality. Charlotte Rampling, 65 years old and un-retouched (both on screen and in real life), is one of them. The daughter of a British colonel and NATO commander, Rampling attended tony girls’ schools in France and England.

She modeled briefly, before trying films, and burst onto the scene in “Georgy Girl” (1966), in which she played a flirt who is the embodiment of Swinging London. Today, after five decades on screen (including a star turn in Visconti’s classic, “The Damned”), and modeling for everyone from Helmut Newton to Juergen Teller, Rampling’s career shows no signs of abating.

In “The Mill and the Cross” (currently in theaters), the Polish director Lech Majewski’s visually ravishing examination of a Breugel painting, she takes on the Virgin Mary; in “Melancholia” (opening Friday), the bad-boy Danish director Lars von Trier’s latest, her character is based upon von Trier’s despised mother. And in the fashion world, Rampling continues to inspire: Marc Jacobs designed much of his fall 2011 collection for Louis Vuitton after her role in “The Night Porter” (1974), Liliana Calvani’s controversial, S&M-infused drama about a death-camp survivor’s affair with a Nazi officer (think: leather caps and suspenders).

Age cannot Love destroy,
But perfidy can blast the flower,
Even when in most unwary hour
It blooms in Fancy’s bower.
Age cannot Love destroy,
But perfidy can rend the shrine
In which its vermeil splendours shine.
~Untitled (1810); titled "Love's Rose" by William Michael Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)