Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant and Simon Helberg discussed “Florence Foster Jenkins” for the Reel Pieces with Annette Insdorf series. Discussing her star turn in Florence Foster Jenkins, Streep talked about her studying opera as a teenager with a teacher in New York, Estelle Liebling. “I’d travel from New Jersey to New York to study with her. She was a great teacher and I was an idiot. I was a teenager. I thought opera was boring, and I wanted to be a cheerleader, so I quit and started smoking,” she said. Noting that she always “loved music,” she said that “if you have children, when they’re babies, they let you sing to them. But after that, no. My kids were always telling me to shut up, so I didn’t sing at home.”

Streep said she first heard of Jenkins while studying at the Yale School of Drama when her fellow students passed around cassette tapes of Jenkins’ recordings. “When I really started listening, I just fell in love with the person behind the aspiration, the dream—you can hear it in her voice, how she sings,” she explained. Streep said her friend, the actress Audra McDonald, sent Streep to her teacher, who she said, “taught me to sing arias as well as I could.” She also said Helberg performed with her live while making the film, “so we really had to know the music very, very well.”