“As I get older, I don’t look as good, but I don’t give a damn,” says British actress Dame Helen Mirren. Picture: AFP

So when she frocked up last month to attend the Tony Awards, it’s fair to say she was stepping outside her comfort zone. Yet there was a very special reason why she was there, one completely obliterated by the social media storm that erupted before she’d even left the stage.

Meg wanted to introduce a performance by the cast of She Loves Me, the musical that inspired her hit film You’ve Got Mail, because she’s always had a fondness for the movie. It was written by her dear late friend Nora Ephron and enabled her to work, once again, with her great mate Tom Hanks.

Yet as she stood there in her nude and silver dress, beaming with that quirky grin that made her the queen of rom-coms through the 1980s and ’90s, all anyone saw was THE FACE.

Meg Ryan in 1994.Source:News Corp Australia

Meg Ryan at the Tony Awards in New York on June 12, 2016.Source:Getty Images

THE FACE was “shocking” and “shiny” and “weird”, according to the tweets. “Dear God, what happened to Meg Ryan?” asked one commenter. “Oh no, what has Meg Ryan had done?” said another. One simply posted a picture of Jack Nicholson’s The Joker with the caption: “Meg Ryan looked good.”

Now Ryan’s face is not the first to send social media into a meltdown. Renee Zellweger nearly broke the internet with her visage two years earlier and the likes of Courtney Love, Priscilla Presley, Daryl Hannah and Melanie Griffith can always be relied upon to provide “Plastic Surgery Shocker” headlines for the mags.

Rather, what was surprising about Meg’s “freaky face” was the scale of the response. The day after the mass shooting in Orlando, the worst massacre in modern American history, Meg’s face was the highest-trending topic on Facebook.

Renee Zellweger on the red carpet in 2004.Source:Supplied

The star looking almost unrecognisable in 2014.Source:Getty Images

Yes, 49 people were killed in cold blood in a gay club but that was of less interest than the questionably inflated lips of a 54-year-old actor.

It seems we have high expectations that female Hollywood actors should remain looking as youthful and luminous as they did when they were 25 but, more worryingly, it appears that they actually care about our expectations.

How else to explain why so many now have the same “chipmunk” cheeks, shiny foreheads and lips that look like freshly pumped bicycle tyres. Yet the question persists: Why, when they have so much money, do they look so bad?

Sydney cosmetic surgeon Dr William Mooney believes it’s only the horror faces that make the headlines. “You only see bad cosmetic surgery,” he points out. “If it is good cosmetics, the thought is it’s ‘natural’ or they’re ‘genetically blessed’. Poor cosmetic surgery on the other hand is just so visible and with the firestorm on social media that a bad Botox day causes, it seems that that is all that’s out there.”

But what if some celebrities simply age in a less favourable way than others?

“Poor Meg, she’s just had bad work done,” says Mooney. “I often wonder about this. Are spineless cosmeticians bullied into this by VIPs? There’s just no way she could look like this having left any reputable clinic.”

Others, he says, seem to deliberately adopt a “fake” look.

Pamela Anderson on Baywatch.Source:No Source

Pammie at event in LA last month. Picture: WireimageSource:Getty Images

“Donatella Versace, Pammy Anderson, Melanie Griffith and Cher all share the same more-is-less concept of facial restitution. I am not sure how they get it so wrong. Perhaps bad press is better than no press.”

As for the “chipmunk” look, he’s not a fan: “Fillers should only be used to replace what’s gone — overfilling gives that horrid chipmunk look. Yuck.”

Janet Muggivan, who has worked in the beauty industry for more than 30 years and recently launched Beauty Dossier, an online course for women aged over 45, believes there are two key contributing factors to why we’re seeing so many strange faces.

She’s saddened that wonderful talents like Meg Ryan are suddenly measured by their faces and not their craft. “Just one night out and she was shredded, with everyone forgetting the thousands of hours of pleasure she’s given us over the years.” But she makes some illuminating points about why so many smart and talented women succumb to pressure to mess around with their faces.

Fashion designer Donatella Versace in 1998.Source:News Limited

Donatella Versace at the Met Gala in New York in May, 2016.Source:Getty Images

Firstly, it’s Hollywood and there is no bigger or intense fishbowl in terms of how women look. “It’s such an artificial bubble and so the women there only see what other Hollywood women are doing to their faces and they lose perspective,” Muggivan says. “If all your contemporaries are having work done, you feel it’s the norm, but just as you can get a great plumber and an average plumber, the same happens with cosmetic surgery.”

She also says women start using Botox and fillers and while the injectables may last six months, they get impatient and start repeating them at four months. As she says: “Practitioners are then working on a version of their face that’s already altered. ”

Yet when your income and sense of worth are attached to your face, is it any wonder it messes with women’s minds … and their faces?

Short of steering clear of that fishbowl, as women such as Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet and Meryl Streep tend to do, how can maturing actors maintain their livelihood and confidence when it’s proven they become marginalised when they age? A University of Southern California study of 700 of the top-grossing films from 2007-14 showed that just 21.8 per cent of characters aged 40 to 64 were women. Indeed, in 2014 no female actors aged over 45 performed a leading role.

For a start, we can support them at the box office and we can grant them the same respect we show men by focusing on their talent not just their looks. As Mooney points out: “Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Daniel Day Lewis — they’re hardly picture-perfect cosmetic champions and yet they’re the finest and most respected actors in Tinseltown. ”

He hopes we won’t continue to see so much poor cosmetic work and points out that procedures are being refined. “Rhinoplasty is a totally different procedure these days and a thread lift as opposed to a formal face lift is better for women in their thirties and forties.”

Perhaps, though, the real solution is to try very hard not to care. As Dame Helen Mirren says: “I’m a woman who loves make-up and getting dressed up. As I get older, I don’t look as good, but I don’t give a damn.”