Have you seen the television ad showing a little old lady getting a helping hand from a young man as she crosses a parking lot? Normally, I am ad-adversive, but this one has caught my attention several times and held me fascinated.

The lady has just been food shopping and is presumably walking toward her car. When she meets the nicely dressed young professional, who works in a Citizens Bank branch at the supermarket, she asks him to lend her his arm. This he gladly does, assuming her automobile to be parked nearby. When she delivers her punch line, he has been clearly one-upped: “Oh, I don’t have a car,” she says sweetly.

This ad, I have discovered, was filmed last January in California. This information comes from the woman who stars in it. Last week I interviewed her by telephone in Forest Hills, New York where she has lived for a long time.

Her name is Mildred Clinton and she describes herself as a “character actress.” Over the telephone she sounds just as charming as she does in the ad. The extent of her work as an actress surprised and impressed me. She played the mother of the Al Pacino character in the film Serpico and she has appeared in three movies directed by Spike Lee.

Early in our conversation I told her my age of 74, hoping this would make it easier for her to tell me hers. But “women can’t tell their age,” she informed me firmly but sympathetically, thereby revealing she’s in a certain range. Also her frequent use of “Jiminy Cricket” as her expletive of choice suggests that she was not born the day before yesterday.

As the ad shows, Mildred is short in physical stature. “I always had a good figure,” she says of herself, but she was only five feet three-and-a- half inches in height. By now, she has become shorter still, she volunteers. In some of her ads and films she appears taller, however.

What most impressed me about Mildred Clinton is her zest for life. “I fall in love with whatever I’m doing because it’s always a challenge,” she says of her work.

Mildred is determined to resist negative thinking. “I think each of us is our own most severe critic,” she told me, “and some days I feel positively negative.” However, the personal dynamism of the woman became almost tangible to me in our phone conversation.

How does she feel about growing older? “I am very lucky,” she replies, “to be busy with work that I love. My whole life was set in a way in which you do interesting things.”

Her interesting things began long ago. She appeared in a play that featured Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne when it tried out in Boston decades ago. “They were amazing people,” she says of the Lunts. Remembering a certain by-play between them during a rehearsal, she still marvels at their exchange.

Sitting in the theater, Alfred Lunt called out to his wife “You’ve got too much eye makeup.” Lynne ignored him for a while but finally gave in. “Oh Alfred,” she exclaimed as she left to brush away some of the make up. Mildred still feels the music of Lynne’s voice in those two words “Oh Alfred.”

Mildred worked with another famous theatrical couple – Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. She thinks it was in a television drama rather than a performance on the stage. “You could have hugged them,” she says, as she recalls feeling tempted to ask Cronyn if she could.

Mildred Clinton appreciates late life in other ways as well. “Everything makes me feel rich,” she says. “When you’re young, 13 or 14, these things seem unreachable.”

The only downer in Mildred’s life is widowhood. She lost her husband to an early death, at age 42, and has lived by herself in Forest Hills since that time. She boasts of being a “distinguished alumna” of Brooklyn College where she majored in French.

Talking with this woman buoyed up my spirits. And that was without being able to accept right away her invitation to take me to lunch at Sardi’s,the famous Manhattan restaurant. At the end of our conversation, Mildred told me, “You’ve made my day!”  Those words exactly echoed my own sentiments.

For an appraisal of the ad, I turned to my favorite advertising guru, John Carroll. He appears on Boston’s public television show “Greater Boston,” for which he is executive producer. He thinks this ad “works” in delivering its message effectively.

Of Mildred Clinton’s performance, Carroll says, “She delivers a great punch line,” a sentiment that no doubt the veteran New York character actress and her fans will be happy to hear.

As to the view of aging presented here, Carroll gives this ad high marks. “It casts older people in a reasonably positive light,” he says. “I find it kind of endearing,” he adds.

So do I.

Richard Griffin