Extreme diets, Tai Chi and kale – we discover the stars’ secrets to eternal (relative) youth .

“May you build a ladder to the stars/And climb on every rung/May you stay forever young,” sang Mr Bob Dylan. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but not one that Mr Dylan himself strictly adhered to. He looks every one of his 75 years. The men we’ve gathered together, however, seem to have been giddily ascending Mr Dylan’s magical ladder. They all look at least a decade shy of their professed age. How have they done it (in the presumed absence of major surgical intervention or Faustian pacts with the devil)? We endeavour to find out, and pick out a few products that might help you in your own efforts to scale those recondite rungs.

He’s a former nightclub entrepreneur and current proprietor of a spirits brand (including Casamigos, a tequila he launched with his best friend, a certain Mr George Clooney), but Mr Rande Gerber clearly hasn’t been over-indulging in either of his ventures. His laudable presentation (and his willingness to continue to rock the chest-exposing open shirt) can be put down to his efforts to keep up with his wife, the perennially jogging, Pilates-promoting, Zone Diet-following, free-weight-lifting, mindfulness-mindful Ms Cindy Crawford. Early-morning runs from their Malibu beach house keep Mr Gerber’s tan topped up, while holding court in nearby Soho Beach House and regular Easy Rider-style biking with Mr Clooney help him maintain a youthful outlook, which is just as well. “I don’t want to grow up,” he says.

Can you believe that Mr Kevin Bacon’s breakthrough role as the subversively shod, shimmying small-town rebel Ren McCormack in Footloose was a full 32 years ago? Mr Bacon is now 58 – 58! – and has two twentysomething kids, but his sharp cheekbones, retroussé nose, choppy quiff and spry mien all remain intact. He puts this down to a number of factors: an inability to grow facial hair (“If you ever see me with sideburns, they’re not real”), a penchant for kale (he claims to “massage” the vegetable before ingestion to “up the flavour”, which may well be TMI) and a fitness regime that encompasses hiking, weights, calisthenics, personal training and – Footloose to the end – dancing in skintight Ms Britney Spears-esque bodysuits in those charming EE ads.

Maybe it’s a tribute to the dignified old jazzers he reveres. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that he’s married to Ms Emilie Livingston, an Olympic gymnast half his age. But it’s most likely because he became a first-time dad at the age of 62. Yes, Mr Jeff Goldblum is the only salt-and-pepper sexagenarian we know who’s comfortable enough in his own skin to regularly sport the super-skinny looks of Saint Laurent and Prada – and carry them off with style to spare. It turns out that the “own skin” bit is crucial. “I’ve never used Botox, never had plastic surgery,” he says. “When you try to be youthful, it only makes you look older.” Further, he eats “fruits and vegetables and wholegrains and lean protein”, counts 10,000 steps a day on his FitBit, and chest-presses his young son, one-year-old Mr Charlie Ocean Goldblum.

We’d resist the “Born To Run” references if a) this weren’t a shot of the enviably physiqued Mr Bruce Springsteen indulging in that very activity, and b) it wasn’t the title of his recently released autobiography, in which Mr Springsteen details how he went from a junk-food junkie to a bulked-up powerhouse in the mid-1980s, thanks to the intervention of a personal trainer who got him running four to six miles a day, three days a week, and throwing himself at the free weights and rowing machines in the gym on his “off days”. Add in Mr Springsteen’s vegetarian diet and lifelong antipathy to drugs and he remains “dispiritingly handsome and preposterously fit”, according to a recent profile, all the better to continue the dramatic knee skids, athletic piano leaps and air-punching exuberance that are hallmarks of his mammoth live performances.

Has Mr Dane DeHaan got a portrait of himself mouldering away in the attic, in the style of Mr Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray? (He may well have. He was painted by the polymath Mr James Franco, in typically exuberant style, some years ago.) The fact is that, at 30, he appears somehow more artless than he did when he played the callow son of Mr Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond The Pines half a decade ago. “You look about 15,” observed Mr Jimmy Fallon during a recent interview with Mr DeHaan, in which he revealed he has to flourish his ID in order to be served wine in restaurants and can be seen gurning in the photo on his driver’s licence in a (doomed) attempt to look less pubescent. His secret? Not ice baths or even degenerating portraits, apparently. Just “good genes, I guess”.

Mr Viggo Mortensen has never played the Hollywood game. When he missed out on a Best Actor Oscar, in 2008 for Eastern Promises, he tried to get his horrified fellow rejectees to join in a “losers’ dance”, and he obviously takes a similarly phlegmatic approach to the ageing process. At 57, he puts his sprightly demeanour and fresh-faced appearance down to a healthy roster of outside interests – he paints, he takes photographs, he writes poetry, he runs a publishing house, he lives in Madrid with 47-year-old actress Ms Ariadna Gil – and an off-the-grid outdoorsman lifestyle akin to the character he plays in his latest film, Captain Fantastic. While shooting The Lord Of The Rings trilogy in New Zealand, Mr Mortensen apparently largely eschewed shoes, and skinned, cooked and ate his own roadkill.

Mr Alexander Skarsgård could easily pass for a twentysomething, for which he credits his freewheeling Stockholm childhood in the bosom of a large, extended family, his much-on relationship with model and It girl Ms Alexa Chung, eight years his junior, and, last but not least, Tarzan. It’s not that Mr Skarsgård was averse to exercise before landing the role of Viscount Greystoke – he spent 15 months with the Swedish marines and was noted for his distance running – but, as he told MR PORTER, he spent three months bulking up on a daily 7,000-calorie-intake-and-weightlifting regime before switching to a sugar-, gluten-, wheat-, dairy- and alcohol-free diet alongside twice-daily training sessions. He’s also trekked to the South Pole with Prince Harry and spent three weeks sailing across the Atlantic. “I like pushing things a little,” he says. “It stops you getting complacent.”

You can’t accuse Mr Jamie Foxx of cutting corners when it comes to immersing himself in a role. He spent days wearing prosthetic eyelids to play Mr Ray Charles, and won an Oscar for doing so. He’s equally committed to the blood, sweat and (non-prosthetic) tears that’s entailed in keeping himself in prime condition. Despite his rakish reputation (his bachelor pad is known as “Party Central”, and there have been rumours of nude basketball sessions), Mr Foxx claims not to have touched alcohol since 2008, and pairs intense daily workouts – 45 minutes of weight training and (fully clothed) basketball drills – with a low-carb, high-fibre, high-protein diet of the fish-vegetables-and-protein-shake variety. “I wouldn’t have the energy I do if I didn’t keep at it,” he says. “I feel refreshed. I feel young.”

In truth, Mr Keanu Reeves has always looked younger than he is. To many, he’s the eternal adolescent from the Bill & Ted movies, always ready to unleash an “Excellent!” or an “Egregious!”, but the occasion of his turning 50, a couple of years ago, triggered a wave of incredulity. Had he taken the red pill, while we were all living in a Matrix-like simulation where we all grew old and he didn’t? Mr Reeves, characteristically enigmatic, has offered few clues as to the secret of his perpetual youthfulness. Yes, he’s learned various martial arts for movies from The Matrix to 47 Ronin, which keep him worked out and Zenned. Yes, he continues to practise Tai Chi (and sees it as key to “physical and spiritual health and wellbeing”). Other than that, he shrugs, “it’s just something inherited, I guess. I will just thank my mom and dad.”

“Clap along, if you feel, like a room without… any visible need for pore-tightening concentrate or extra-firming eye lift…” Mr Williams’ surpassing rapport with happiness allows him to chortle defiantly in the face of the ageing process. The 43-year-old has dismissed persistent internet rumours that he’s some kind of vampiric Benjamin Button manqué and revealed that the secret to his lack of blurred (or, indeed, any other kind of) lines is... “washing my face with cold water once a day to keep pores closed, and using a cheap but gentle cleanser”. He went on to reveal that “Naomi Campbell taught me a couple of tricks back in the day”. Given the community-service risks inherent in adopting some of Ms Campbell’s other top lifestyle tips – the throwing-your-diamond-studded-phone-at-your-PA workout, for example – it seems that Mr Williams got very, very lucky.

The celebrities featured in this story are not associated with and do not endorse MR PORTER or the products shown