"The Waters of Mars": Approaching age 60, Doctor Who actress Lindsay Duncan is still sexy

The most refreshing aspect of the BBC’s forthcoming Doctor Who television special, “The Waters of Mars,” scheduled to be aired in the UK in late 2009, isn’t the youthfulness British actor David Tennant brings to the role of the Time Lord, or the clever storyline that the waters of Mars can transform humans into zombies. Rather, the most refreshing aspect is the decision to cast 58-year-old Scottish actress Lindsay Duncan as Adelaide, head of a base on Mars and "the Doctor's cleverest and most strong-minded companion yet.”

Lindsay Duncan isn’t a household name in the States and she probably will not get as much media attention as fellow Doctor Who actress and barely-legal gal Karen Gillan, but Duncan proves that almost-60 is still sexy and that our planet doesn’t have to revolve around twenty-somethings. Here’s how The Independent, a British newspaper, described Duncan in 2005:

While it would be unforgivably coarse to join those lensmen in a bout of prose slavering over her good looks, it would be prissy to shirk the obvious truths that most film actresses are still required to be beautiful. Some three decades and more after her stage debut, Lindsay Duncan is looking, well, terrific: movie-set glamorous even sitting inconspicuously in a north London coffee shop, dressed in regular old T-shirt and dark trousers with no fancy lighting set-ups, and no more than the most perfunctory hint of slap. Fine-boned and patrician in the face, slender in the body, she could easily pass for a good 15 or 20 years younger than her true age (She was born in 1950, and doesn't seem to give a hoot who knows it.)

Check out Lindsay Duncan in this "The Waters of Mars" photo gallery preview or in this new video trailer (YouTube, 1:15 mins.) that just debuted at Comic-Con 2009 in San Diego.

Pictured: Lindsay Duncan