What Meryl Streep's Acting Choices Reveal About Her
The elusive artist lets her movies do the talking.
Hi friends,
While I have you here, I’d like to share my favorite Meryl Streep story. It goes like this:
A young actress auditions for producer Dino De Laurentiis’s 1976 remake of King Kong. Virtually unknown outside New York theater circles, she has zero experience working in film. Her long, blonde hair, high cheekbones and aquiline nose combine to form timeless beauty: the equivalent of the mysterious muse in a Renaissance painting, a Mona Lisa for the ’70s. People who witnessed the actress’s ferocious performances onstage could vouch for her talent. But all De Laurentiis sees is her face.
“This is so ugly. Why do you bring me this?” he complains in Italian to son Federico.
Well, this had a name: Meryl. And unfortunately for De Laurentiis, she had studied Italian in college and understands what he’s saying.
“I’m very sorry that I’m not as beautiful as I should be, but, you know, this is it. This is what you get,” she replies in his native tongue, showing herself the door.
In that gotcha moment, Meryl gained the upper hand and exposed the producer’s ignorance. De Laurentiis hurt her feelings — she is human, after all — but she thought he was an idiot. Sure, her face was unconventional; at least it wasn’t boring. It had character, a certain je ne sais quoi. It kept you guessing. Eventually, Hollywood discovered what Meryl had known all along, ever since she staged DIY plays for her parents in suburban New Jersey: That she was a leading lady, and possibly the greatest who ever lived.
Contrary to popular perception, Meryl is not a Method actor living the part 24-7, day in and day out. She slips in and out of character like a seasoned professional who’s won three Oscars, made countless movies and has nothing left to prove. Meryl turns 75 years old this month — June 22, to be exact — yet still chases the pleasure and excitement of being on set and becoming other people when the camera starts rolling.
Acting is her oxygen. She needs it to breathe. To stay creatively energized. And with a whopping 97 film and TV credits to her name, she’s shown little interest in retirement.
Look, if I were Meryl Streep, I’d move to the south of France and wear big hats all the time. I would surface from my Mediterranean idyll only to, like, narrate a Ken Burns six-part documentary or the Tom Lake audiobook for my good friend Ann Patchett or receive an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes. Maybe I would casually make a cameo in my pal Stanley Tucci’s travel show — you know, the fancy stuff that grand dames do.
But Meryl being Meryl, she’s done half the above while juggling a vibrant screen career into her golden years. Currently, she stars opposite Martin Short, the world’s funniest person, in the Hulu mystery series Only Murders in the Building. Who wouldn’t want that job? She gets to laugh all day long (amid rumors that she and Marty are dating). For Meryl, acting isn’t work, it’s play. Laurence Mark, her producer on Julie & Julia, compares her “childlike exuberance” to that of Steven Spielberg; those two balance big responsibilities outside the studio lot, but on their movie sets, they never have to grow up. Meryl can try on new identities, costumes and accents, then hang them up at the end of the day.
Five years ago, I published Queen Meryl: The Iconic Roles, Heroic Deeds, and Legendary Life of Meryl Streep with Hachette Books. My elusive subject would not sit down for an interview, but she did confirm and clarify facts that I sent through her publicity team, which then forwarded me her brief but spectacular answers. When I requested confirmation that she had, in fact, championed Tooch for the role of Paul Child in Julie & Julia, Meryl replied, “True, and very very very glad I did.”
To this day, The Meryl Cinematic Universe is still the only “MCU” I can get behind, and it contains infinite multitudes, from dramas (Sophie’s Choice, The Hours, Doubt) to comedies (The Devil Wears Prada, She-Devil, Death Becomes Her) to an action thriller (The River Wild) to the … what was she thinking? Even legends make duds, and hers include such dreck as Dark Matter, Before and After and Evening, each utterly unwatchable.
Meryl is rarely guided by commercial forces or strategy. She is firmly on the artistic side of things and chooses roles according to her mood. Though part of Meryl’s personality remains a mystery, her friends and colleagues paint a portrait of a woman who is playful, serious, open-minded, strong-willed and endlessly surprising, who has smoked cigarettes between takes and mooned her director, whose offbeat repertoire reveals everything about her. Look no further than these unlikely MCU standouts:
SILKWOOD (1983)
Meryl sported a brown mullet and cowboy boots to portray Karen Silkwood in this gripping character study of the labor union activist and the events leading up to her death in 1974 at the age of 28. Silkwood had blown the whistle on unsafe conditions inside the Oklahoma nuclear facility where she worked as a chemical technician; while driving to meet a New York Times reporter, her car careened off a country road and crashed into a culvert, killing her. Under the direction of Mike Nichols, the film suggests that an unknown driver was tailing Silkwood and intentionally caused her fatal swerve. Meryl felt a strong connection to her. She was “a pain in the ass,” she said. “She was no saint, but a real, contradictory human being.”
Meryl’s frame of mind: Rebellious! At the time, she was heavily involved in peaceful protests to dismantle nuclear power and put a stop to the Cold War arms race. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction gave Meryl and many other Americans intense anxiety. What if an unstable individual hell-bent on annihilating the human race controlled the button that released the Bomb? That question kept her up at night. She poured her nervous energy into Silkwood. (Off-camera, she relaxed by grabbing beers with the film’s screenwriter, Nora Ephron, and costume designer, Ann Roth. The trio discussed plastic surgery “ad nauseum,” Roth once told me.)
A CRY IN THE DARK (1988)
The notorious true-crime drama inspired an iconic Seinfeld one-liner (“Maybe the dingo ate your baby!”) but totally bombed at the box office and never got the respect that it deserved. Meryl relocated Down Under with her husband, Don Gummer, and their three children for the filming; the paparazzi staked out the family’s rental home, apparently confusing Meryl and Lindy Chamberlain, the Australian mom wrongfully convicted of murdering her two-month-old daughter, Azaria. To get into character, Meryl wore an unflattering black wig shaped like a bowl and floral, church-lady dresses. With astonishing precision, she mimicked Chamberlain’s accent as well as the steely demeanor that infuriated the mob calling for her imprisonment.
Her frame of mind: Empathetic. By the mid-’80s, Meryl had become the most celebrated actress of her generation. And yet, she also induced eye rolls among journalists because of the extreme lengths she took in preparing for her films. The critic Pauline Kael despised her and accused Meryl of giving robotic performances rather than playing from the heart. Meryl, like Chamberlain, knew how it felt to be misunderstood. “I’m fascinated by that stuff,” she has said, “by how females have to be liked, by the fact that you have to break down and cry to be vulnerable, by the fact that what she was telling was the truth but how she told it was annoying or unattractive or unsympathetic.”
THE RIVER WILD (1994)
In the summer of 1993, Meryl reported to Montana and Oregon to play Gail Hartman, a teacher and white-water rafting pro. Gail’s rustic family vacation implodes when escaped convict Wade (Kevin Bacon, bone-chilling) hijacks the raft she’s steering downriver with her 10-year-old son Roarke (Joe Mazzello) and architect-husband Tom (David Straitharn). Gail and Tom’s marriage is on the rocks because of his workaholic ways, but the harrowing ordeal brings them closer together. Here, Gail emerges as the big hero, managing to outwit Wade and save the day. Meryl, of course, mastered how to navigate a raft and swim the rapids without one.
Her frame of mind: Mama bear. Meryl and her brood had just returned to pastoral Connecticut following a several-year stint in Los Angeles. After turning 40, she found herself in a professional rut that appeared to affect her personal life. She became fodder for thirsty gossip columns and learned the hard way that the film industry was much smaller than it seemed. While her friend Carrie Fisher thrived inside L.A.’s insular, fast-paced bubble, Meryl yearned to commune with nature and keep Don and the kids out of the spotlight. The River Wild allowed Meryl to regain “that old feeling of having climbed a little too high up on the tree — of skating out onto the ice before it’s frozen solid enough.” She later admitted that, yes, “it was a bit of a midlife crisis.”
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)
When Meryl agreed to sink her teeth into Miranda Priestly, the sadistic, high-fashion editrix, she reviewed Aline Brosh McKenna’s clever script, giving notes that brilliantly upgraded the devil’s icy treatment of her underlings. She informed McKenna that she wanted to do and say less and be the calm within the storm. She loved the scribe’s insult comedy, especially the line, “By all means, move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me.” She told McKenna: “Give her more fangs.” For Miranda, Meryl used men as models; there weren’t enough women in power to emulate. “The voice I got from Clint Eastwood,” she explained. “He never, ever, ever raises his voice and everyone has to lean in to listen, and he is automatically the most powerful person in the room. But he is not funny. That I stole from Mike Nichols. The way the cruelest cutting remark, if it is delivered with a tiny self-amused curlicue of irony, is the most effective instruction, the most memorable correction, because everyone laughs, even the target.”
Her frame of mind: Abundance. Meryl had a sixth sense that The Devil Wears Prada was going to be a huge hit, maybe even the biggest of her lifetime. The paycheck, though. It offended her. “The offer was to my mind slightly, if not insulting, not perhaps reflective of my actual value to the project,” Meryl recalled. “There was my ‘goodbye moment,’ and then they doubled the offer. I was 55, and I had just learned, at a very late date, how to deal on my own behalf.” She earned somewhere in the ballpark of $4 million. The movie went on to make $327 million worldwide and introduce Meryl to a younger fanbase who might not have seen The French Lieutenant’s Woman but can recite Miranda’s Cerulean Speech from memory.
MAMMA MIA! (2008)
Meryl shocked highbrow film connoisseurs by signing on to sing, dance and swoon in the big-screen adaptation of Broadway’s Mamma Mia! Unlike the snobbiest of theatergoers, Meryl adored the ABBA-flavored musical and brought her youngest daughter, Louisa, to see it with six of her friends. Swept up in the music and the joy, they danced in the aisles, as they should. One day, Meryl’s agent, Kevin Huvane, fielded an inquiry from Phyllida Lloyd, the director of Mamma Mia!’s film version, gauging her interest in playing Donna Sheridan, a single mom who runs a boutique hotel on a picturesque Greek island. Huvane assumed Meryl would take a pass, but again, his client is full of surprises. “I couldn’t believe that they wanted me to do this part,” Meryl recalled. “I kept asking, are you sure, are you sure?”
Her frame of mind: Ecstatic. At 58, she strapped on overalls, a fixture of her Yale Drama School wardrobe, and pranced around the set like a giddy teenager. She performed the hell out of “The Winner Takes It All.” She fake-married Pierce Brosnan, who couldn’t carry a tune, but who cared? For two months, she threw caution to the wind and let herself go.
Thanks, as always, for reading! And if you’re in New York City on Monday, July 1, I’ll be at Bryant Park’s Reading Room to speak about No Crying in Baseball, which — shameless plug — also makes a good last-minute Father’s Day gift. "Among the 100 or so baseball books published this year, one stands out as the most creative, most unlikely, and most unusual,” the Baseball Writers Association of America says of NCIB.
Yours in “Oh, you zip it, Doris!,”
Erin
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A friend from the University of Houston went to high school with Karen Silkwood, and said that Miss Streep nailed her, absolutely.
Oh to be in on those plastic surgery conversations with Meryl, Nora and Ann