“Apparently I, according to the producers and the writers, am part of the old fogies who are no longer interesting,” she said. But the show also calls for the lead actors to become romantically entangled with one another. And for that job, a 41-year-old, no matter how well preserved, just doesn’t cut the mustard any more.That, at least, is what Kingston surmised when she talked about the shock of losing the part in an interview with the Radio Times. Certainly one can argue, as Kingston herself has, that it is entirely fitting for an actress of 41 to play the head of surgery in a busy Chicago casualty ward. The part of the female lead might call for a battle-scarred district attorney, or a senior surgeon in a busy public hospital, but still you would swear the actress does not look a day over 28.Under the circumstances, we should not be too surprised that Alex Kingston has been dropped from the line-up of ER after seven years as Dr Elizabeth Corday. The most under-represented was women over 40 – which surprised nobody. A few years ago, the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild commissioned a study to see how well different demographic groups were represented on television compared with their strength in the real world.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most over-represented group turned out to be black men.

The most under-represented group was women over 40 – which came as a surprise to absolutely nobody.Switch on the telly on this side of the Atlantic and the evidence is plain to see: plenty of older men, with lined faces expressing character and the hard knocks of experience, surrounded by a bevy of improbably gorgeous 20-somethings. Is it possible that the brothers need a battle, a falling-out, to avoid that dead end? So many great American films – from On the Waterfront to East of Eden, from The Godfather to Raging Bull – turn on sibling rivalry.’The Ladykillers’ opens on 25 June. The Screen Actors Guild commissioned a study a few years ago to find out how well demographic groups were represented on television Surprisingly, the most overrepresented group was black men. Still, it will be sad if the day comes when a new Coen brothers film is regarded as irrelevant or tame. That’s true – and Preston Sturges is alive and well on the strength of a handful of films.

The Big Lebowski, I would suggest, is the last time the brothers seem to have made one of their films without restraint – and that was patently a movie likely to please a very small audience. It cannot be easy for them now to raise the money for a project, and maybe they have used up a lot of the best ideas they had. The Man Who Wasn’t There, especially, looked like a forlorn descent into style for style’s sake. McDormand starred in that in a role worse than the one she had had in Blood Simple, but the film cost $20m and earned $7.5m. Then came Intolerable Cruelty, a project that was a lot more expensive because it elected to go with the “glamour” of George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones: it cost $60m and made $35m, and it left very few critics happy. And now, most recently, there is Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers – to which most reviewers and audiences have responded: “Why?”What it amounts to is that, despite Fargo, the Coen brothers at or close to 50 are still uncertain quantities in Hollywood Yes, they might hit the jackpot, but not for aiming at it And even their fans, I think, have grown wary.

They did much better with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which was a cunning re-working of themes from Preston Sturges, one of the directors who seems to have influenced the brothers and another case of early burn-out.Since then, they have done The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), a painfully studied homage to film noir in which the photography becomes a leading character in the picture. (The best picture award was lost to The English Patient, but I suspect it was a close call.)It seemed like a moment of triumph, achieved without any compromise. There must have been many suggestions that the brothers had wandered inadvertently into their own franchise. Why not Marge II, or Marge Goes to Minneapolis – Marge Against the Mafia, even?No dice. But, as never before, the Coens had given us someone to like in the form of Marge, the local policewoman, as played by Frances McDormand.Some had said already that McDormand was the trump card in the Coen pack, but this was the first time they had given her a lead or trusted her dogged, sour warmth.