More Celebrities Become Mommies After 40

Perhaps the most famous older mother in the world, Madonna (43) waited until 38 to fall pregnant with Lourdes, and gave birth to Rocco on August 11, 2000, just days before her 42nd birthday. Rocco's father is British filmmaker Guy Ritchie.

Kooky Helena, 41, and her equally quirky boyfriend Tim Burton, 49, nearly resorted to IVF in order to conceive their second child but it finally happened naturally. The couple did battle with some conventional - and unconventional - fertility treatments. Fearing that, like most women over 40, she wasn't ovulating regularly, Bonham Carter, a devotee of alternative therapies, decided first on a fertility drug called Clomid to stimulate egg production. "I had a terrible reaction to it. It turned out I was ovulating anyway," the actress told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper Monday.

After going to a North London acupuncturist who supplied a variety of teas to "build my strength up," Bonham Carter, also tried Tui Na (literally "push and grasp"), an acupuncture-related Chinese massage for patients who prefer to avoid needles. But with her biological clock ticking loudly in her ear, she realized Oriental medicine wasn't the solution she'd hoped for - and the next viable option was In vitro fertilization.

Before going for IVF, while being directed by Burton alongside Johnny Depp in the title role of Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd, Bonham Carter discovered she was pregnant .

At age 45, Jane Seymour gave birth to twin boys by C-section a month before their due date because of high blood pressure complications. She shares her experience as the mother of multiples in her book Two at a Time: Having Twins - The Journey Though Pregnancy and Birth. Her sons, John and Kristopher, husband James Keach, and the rest of her family reside in Malibu, California.

Iman, now 53, had a baby, Alexandria (Lexi) at age 45 with rocker David Bowie". Iman has another child from a former marriage who is now 30. "People talk about the miracle of birth. No. There's the miracle of conception. I did IVF, but nothing happened. So I began to think of adoption, and then I got pregnant. It was definitely a miracle."

"The difference between rearing a child in your 20s and one in your 50s is one of patience," Iman says. "I was at the height of my career when I had my first child, and I took her with me around the world. Then I had to root her in school. It was difficult to leave her behind. Now this one thinks she has it tough because both her old parents are at home with her all the time.

Naomi Watts, 40, and Liev Schreiber welcomed their second child, son Samuel Kai Schreiber. The couple have been together since 2005. Their first son, Alexander Pete, nicknamed Sasha, was born July 25, 2007, in Los Angeles.

Helen Hunt and her boyfriend Matthew Carnahan are the parents Makena'lei, who is named after a town in Hawaii where Hunt likes to vacation. Helen was 40 when her daughter (who was 4 at the time of this photo) was born.

In an interview with "Ladies Home Journal", Helen said the following:
"It turned out to be tougher to get pregnant than I thought it would be. I tried for a long time and it just didn't happen, to the point where getting pregnant became the greatest wish -- and the greatest challenge -- of my life. My fate wasn't to jump into the backseat of a car and have a baby. My boyfriend and I were on our last big try and if the baby hadn't come, we would have adopted. But then I did get pregnant -- in 2003."