Meryl Streep has received two Oscars (out of a total eight nominations), a wad of rave reviews and had every producer in the business on bended knees before her. She has become a sort of toten figure, an icon of the ‘quality’ end of commercial American cinema, but for all her success, all the admiration she inspires, she is, strangely, not much loved by the movie-going public: women tend to find her prissy and irritating, men want more warmth, more tantalising sexuality. Perhaps this is because she is, of all the screen divas, the surpreme chameleon, possessed of a virtuoso acting technique which allows her to slither through an incredible variety of incarnations without leaving her audience any very clear idea of who the person behind them all might be. Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe – we know exactly who they are, inasmuch as they always project the same range of character traits, the same drawl, the same rolling of the eyes. But Meryl Streep is far too cultivated and subtle a performer for that. Her every cinematic self is dazzingly different, a meticulously constructed fiction which, as she puts it, “you can lie down and wrap yourself up in.”

And that’s the way she likes it. The ‘real’ Meryl Streep is infuriatingly but genuinly private, treating the press with a hauteur that has won her a measure of hostility. The ‘real’ Meryl Streep can be glossed over in a paragraph – a shy, clever girl born of Dutch descent in a respectable New Jersey suburb, who studied at the Yale School of Drama and spent the first years of her career making her a name on and off Broadway before hitting the movies in the late 1970s with small but noticeable parts in “Julia” and “The Deer Hunter”. After the death of the first man in her life, she married the sculptor Don Gummer. They now live with their three children near Hartford, Connecticut.