81 Years Old Females

Judith Sheindlin is a prosecution lawyer, television personality, and author. Since 1996, she has been presiding over her own arbitration reality court show Judge Judy, which has won four Daytime Emmy Awards. The longest-serving judge in the history of the courtroom-themed program, Judith Sheindlin was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Emmy for her work.

Veteran actress, Lin Shaye, has been active in the entertainment industry since the early 1970s. She developed a love for acting as a young child and studied acting at the University of Michigan. Beginning her career with small roles in plays, she eventually branched out into films as well. She is considered a formidable character actress.  

Gemma Jones is an English actress best known for playing Madam Poppy Pomfrey in the popular Harry Potter film series. A talented actress, Jones won the prestigious British Academy Television Award for playing Mary in the critically acclaimed television film, Marvellous.

Often described by tabloids as the "thinking man’s sex symbol," Valerie Perrine won a BAFTA for her role of Honey Bruce in Lenny. Fans also loved her as Eve Teschmacher in the Superman franchise. Famous for her voluptuous figure, Perrine had started her career as a Vegas show girl.

Retired English actress Joanna Pettet is best known for her role in the Broadway play Poor Richard, for which she won a Theatre World Award. She studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and began her career as a stage actress. She eventually started acting in films and TV shows as well.

Judith Durham is an Australian musician, singer, and songwriter. In 1963, she became the lead singer of the popular folk-influenced pop quartet The Seekers, which became the first Australian pop band to achieve major sales and chart success in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her services to music earned her the title Victorian of the Year in 2015.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is an American historian, biographer, and former sports journalist. She is best known for writing presidential biographies, including Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga. In 1995, she won the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars. She graduated from the University of Glasgow and pursued an academic career. In 2018, she received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her discovery of radio pulsars. She donated the three million dollars she received as prize money.  

Elaine Pagels is an American historian who serves as a professor at Princeton University. Pagels, who is credited with conducting extensive research into Gnosticism and early Christianity, came up with the influential book The Gnostic Gospels. The book has been named among the 100 best books of the 20th century by Modern Library.

Born in Hungary, Sylvia Plachy fled to the US with her family after the Hungarian Revolution. Now a renowned photographer, she is mainly known for her stint with the US newsweekly The Village Voice. A Guggenheim fellow and a Lucie Award winner, she is also the mother of Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody.

Born to Italian writer Cino Boccazzi, Kuki Gallmann later moved to Kenya with her husband and son, both of whom she lost in separate accidents. Taking up Kenyan citizenship, she focused on ecological conservation. He bestselling book I Dreamed Of Africa was later made into a movie.

Shannon Lucid once held the record for the longest space stay by any woman and by any American. Born in China, to missionaries, she was imprisoned by the Japanese, along with her parents, as an infant. The family then moved to the U.S., where Lucid studied at the University of Oklahoma.