Anna Friel, Judi Dench and the wrinkle wars Since the singer Beyoncé had her daughter Blue Ivy last year, she has embarked on a military-style exercise and nutrition regime to get back to a body that can slip into a tight gold corset and strut on stage without embarrassment. While Beyoncé is still only 31, even stars over 50 are expected to defy any signs of ageing: at 54, Madonna's diet and workout routine is notoriously relentless, while 52-year-old Julianne Moore - considered one of Hollywood's more relaxed and natural beauties - described her terrified realisation that she had to start "training" when she was nominated for a Golden Globe: "I did this... juice thing. I've never done one before, but I was desperate. Further up ahead, in the rockier territory of the mid-70s, Jane Fonda - ever a pioneer - has frankly celebrated her debt to her plastic surgeon and the buoyancy of her sex life. While most famous women now admit at least to having tried Botox, fewer will freely discuss more radical procedures. Yet the world of plastic surgery beyond the "injectables," Botox and fillers, is a roaring, albeit discreet, trade in face-lifts that have become ever more sophisticated and subtle, as clients try to avoid the dated "caught in a wind tunnel" look. Celebrities, of course, have always been particularly obsessed by preventing signs of ageing, for practical as well as psychological reasons: when your face is your fortune, wrinkles can hit you in the bank account. Marlene Dietrich encouraged her hairdressers to pull her hair tightly back and use carefully concealed surgical tape to perform a home-made facelift. Beautiful women in Hollywood have long dreaded the moment when the offers to play the mother rather than the ingénue start trickling in: the difference is that, today, there are many more surgical or quasi-medical "solutions" which promise to arrest the process. In recent years, however - thanks to a lucrative, burgeoning anti-ageing industry - celebrity anxieties have been democratised: a range of high-street salons now enable any ordinary woman with sufficient funds to join in, while mass-market magazines puff the latest medical and surgical procedures in a style that they were wary of a decade ago. In the US, some have strongly criticised the feverish combination of science and quackery that characterises the multi-billion-dollar anti-ageing industry. Arlene Weintraub, author of Selling The Fountain of Youth, has attacked the questionable science and ingredients behind many of the latest miracle "cures," pills and fad diets which treat ageing not as a natural process, but as an illness. In some cases, she argues, they may even be dangerous, particularly those involving poorly regulated hormone replacement therapy. It is understandable that the baby-boomer generation wishes to grow old in a different style to that of its parents: hitting 50 - or even 80 - today need not mean surrendering to elasticated slacks and the ubiquitous granny perm that once ruled the high streets of Middle England. But for a minority of women, an exaggerated fear of ageing seems to be blotting out enjoyment of life in the moment. There has long been a subtle difference between the view of ageing in the US and in European countries such as France. In the US, it seems, the goal is often to look younger: in France, a country known for celebrating the older woman, the beauty salons are still busy, but the goal is more to look well for one's age: actresses such as Catherine Deneuve, 69, and Juliette Binoche, 49, are still celebrated for their allure. Do men judge women for getting older? Not, perhaps, as harshly as women themselves do: in recent months I have heard trenchant male admiration expressed for Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, all of whom project an image of confidence and style rather than anxiety. The ceaseless battle for youth seems to stem more from a fierce, competitive perfectionism in the female psyche, and every woman draws her own line on where to stop. But I wonder if, when death inevitably approaches, many of the most ardent anti-ageing warriors might one day look back and wish they had devoted more time to relishing the life they had.