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MERYL STREEP - HER PECULIAR CAREER
Magazine / Source: The New York Times, September 1994 |
Meryl Streep is sitting in a hotel suite in New York, slowly picking at a
fruit salad. She looks like a hip, scrubbed, well-to-do farm girl, far younger
than 45. Her blonde hair is knotted in two shoulder-length pigtails; she's
wearing a loose, casually sleek dark green dress. Her fingers toy with the stone
and glass necklace around her throat.
Streep is distant but friendly and, at 5 foot 6, surprisingly slight. While
not glamorous, she is quite beautiful. She hates interviews. "I hate seeing
myself pontificating," she says flatly. "I can't bear it, as if I'm an expert on
anything. I'm barely in control of my own life. And there's the pressure to be
articulate. With motherhood, you can barely put the subject before the predicate
and make a sentence."
The most acclaimed actress of her generation also hates re-examining a
20-year career that began with Shakespeare, flourished with William Styron and
has, most recently, veered toward Robert James Waller, the author of the coy and
overripe best seller "The Bridges of Madison County," the movie version of which
Streep began filming last week. In the last decade, the actress once called the
female equivalent of Laurence Olivier has moved from critical successes to box
office disappointments. "Bridges" is a financial coup, but it's an unusual
choice for the star of "Sophie's Choice," one Streep probably would not have
made 10 years ago. But then, surviving as a movie actress at the age of 45 is
nothing less than Darwinian.
"You play the cards you're dealt," she says. "I've done the parts that have
marched into my living room. I've asked Bill Styron to write another 'Sophie's
Choice,' but he hasn't. And I can't play Nat Turner. You know we all sort of
pick what's in season, what's right at the time.
"It's not as if there's a pathway of choices and you're devising a game plan
through them," she continues. "Every actress will tell you they have maybe two
things per year that they can possibly stand to put themselves into."
In the past year, Streep put herself into "House of the Spirits," which came
and went quickly last spring, and "The River Wild," which opens on Sept. 30. A
big-budget action-adventure movie with a feminist slant, "The River Wild" is
perhaps even a greater departure for Streep than "Bridges." And even before it
has opened, the film has revived Streep's career, bathing her in the kind of
glory Hollywood bestows with hefty receipts.
Because of the buzz on "The River Wild," Streep's pay has climbed
substantially: she will receive $4 million to $5 million for "Bridges," plus a
percentage of the gross, putting her in the same league as younger stars like
Geena Davis, Meg Ryan and Demi Moore.
Demi Moore?
"To use an overused word, but in her case it applies, Meryl is a genius,"
says Alan J. Pakula, who directed Streep in her Academy Award-winning role in
"Sophie's Choice." "She has a remarkable, God-given talent, combined with an
absolutely first-rate intelligence. She has an acting range that's as broad as
she wants it to be. I sometimes wish Meryl had been English because she would
have done so many great classical roles for which she has a gift more than any
actress on earth."
To understand her initial and extraordinary impact on Hollywood, one must
recall not only the moment Streep arrived -- in the late 1970's -- but her
lineage. She hit Hollywood when the reigning female stars were Goldie Hawn and
Barbra Streisand, Sally Field and Cher. Streep had been trained at Yale and
nurtured at the New York Shakespeare Festival. She outdistanced her
contemporaries with roles (and accents) set against backdrops like the
Holocaust, Africa in the 20's and postwar England.
She had a perfect East Coast pedigree, signaling quality and class. Streep
grew up in Summit, N.J., the older sister to two brothers. Her father was an
executive with Merck, the pharmaceutical company; her mother was a commercial
artist.
At Vassar, she majored in drama. After an audition at the Yale Drama School,
in which she delivered lines from Portia in "The Merchant of Venice" and Blanche
in "A Streetcar Named Desire," Streep was given a three-year scholarship.
She was indeed a formidable talent, and her career was charmed. Days after
arriving in New York in 1975, Streep began working at the New York Shakespeare
Festival and the Phoenix Theater. By 1977, she had a small role in the film
"Julia." A year later, she received an Academy Award nomination for her role in
"The Deer Hunter" and an Emmy for her performance in the NBC mini-series
"Holocaust."
Streep didn't hang out in Malibu. She lived in SoHo, the Upper East Side,
Connecticut. She married a sculptor, Donald Gummer, and began raising a family.
And Hollywood loved it. Loved her distance, her reclusiveness and, to some
extent, her aloofness from the place. By 1979, Streep had appeared in three
significant films. In "Manhattan," she played a fierce (and funny)
lesbian-feminist. In "The Seduction of Joe Tynan," she was a sexy Southern civil
rights lawyer. And in "Kramer vs Kramer," she played a woman who leaves her
husband and son to search for her identity.
The parts that followed, like "The French Lieutenant's Woman," "Sophie's
Choice," "Out of Africa," "Plenty" and "Silkwood," solidified Streep's position
not only as Hollywood's pre-eminent actress, but its most chameleon-like.
Pakula still recalls the first rehearsal of "Sophie's Choice." "Before we
began to read, we were sitting around for an hour, doing the usual kibitzing,"
he says. "She said the first line of dialogue, and it had nothing to do with the
actress I'd been talking to. My reaction was shock. Somewhere along the line,
she had created this woman inside of herself."
Robert Redford, her co-star in "Out of Africa," says that "what she does is
to convert the very difficult technical tasks -- a Dutch accent, a Polish one,
an Australian one -- into a comfortability so you believe it. She has this
extraordinary sense of truth."
In time, however, the gravity she brought to her work made her a threat,
perhaps even an anachronism, in the movie business. There was an inevitable
reaction. Lighten up, said the critics. Enough with the accents, said the
industry. And Streep, eager to please, aware that her movies were not making
money and acutely sensitive to criticism, tried to join the party.
Abpruptly, she changed the kind of movies she made.
"Heartburn," (1986) was a featherweight comedy based on Nora Ephron's book of
the same name. In "She-Devil" (1989), Streep co-starred with Roseanne Barr and
played a ditzy romance novelist. In "Postcards From the Edge" (1990), she played
an actress saddled with drugs, men and a show-business mother. "Defending Your
Life" (1991) was a loopy Albert Brooks comedy about the afterlife of an ad man.
"Death Becomes Her" (1992), in which she co-starred with Goldie Hawn, was the
first plastic surgery comedy. Most of the films could best be described as
rental fare, not "Meryl Streep" movies.
"The one thing Meryl couldn't do was the one thing she desperately wanted to
do," says one prominent director. "She had to prove she's a great comedienne."
But the Carole Lombard approach didn't work. The cumulative reaction --
financial and critical -- to these movies was quite damaging. She tried playing
their game; it didn't succeed. And then the aloofness disappeared and she got
angry. Why, she asked, did male stars like Jack Nicholson earn millions more
than female stars? For the first time in her career, she seemed publicly hurt,
even petulant.
Perhaps the most volcanic change in Streep's career took place in 1991, when
she switched agents. An actor switching agents is not exactly big news, but Sam
Cohn, the prominent New York-based agent at International Creative Management is
not just any agent.
What happened remains murky. Streep speaks hesitantly about it. According to
several agents, the rift centered on casting Streep in "Remains of the Day."
Mike Nichols, whom she regarded as a trusted friend -- he had directed her in
"Heartburn" and "Postcards From the Edge"-- planned to direct the movie. But
after Streep and Jeremy Irons read for him, Nichols apparently decided they were
unsuitable. He declined to tell Streep. So did Cohn, who was also Nichols's
agent. By all accounts, Streep wasn't just outraged, she was deeply hurt. And
she severed her relationship with Cohn, signing with the powerful Creative
Artists Agency. Eventually, the team of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ismail Merchant
and James Ivory took over the film, casting Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in
the lead roles.
"I left because of something Mike did that I felt Sam should have protected
me from," Streep says. She speaks cryptically and emotionally about the episode.
"Mike knows what he did, but unfortunately Sam wore the scar."
Streep says she's now friendly with both men. "My relationship with them is
in the 'life's too short to be mad category,' " she says. "Mike is someone I
share an enormous amount of history with. He has a big part of my heart. I was
very upset to be upset. I have too much of a need for forgiveness in my life."
Nichols refuses to discuss Streep. Cohn says he prefers not to talk about the
falling-out, but then remarks: "In the work I do, one is not privileged to work
too often with artists like Meryl. She has complete technical mastery, she's
extremely intelligent, she has a broad education."
Hollywood partly blamed Cohn. Many said that Streep had been isolated on the
East Coast to her disadvantage and had been treated somewhat like a princess in
a tower.
"That's revolting!" Cohn exclaims. "I'm revolted by that! Meryl is an
intelligent cosmopolitan person. She does not have to live on Rodeo Drive to be
part of the film community."
Streep's shift to C.A.A. coincided in 1991 with a move to Los Angeles, where
she and her husband purchased a house in tony Brentwood, not too far from the
scene of the murders in the O. J. Simpson case. The actress says she made the
move because she was filming a number of movies in Los Angeles. But earlier this
summer, Streep returned to Connecticut, and she insists that this was her intent
in the first place.
"If my children went to high school on the West Coast, that's where they'd go
to college," she says. "And I was afraid I'd be on the East Coast."
One prominent director says that Streep made a mistake moving to California.
"You have to keep a distance from there," he says. "You've got to stay aloof
from the agents and lawyers and gossip. I honestly believe she was looking at
career survival and saying to herself, 'Maybe I should join the mainstream more,
so I'll listen to my agents.' But she appeared in too much dumb stuff. She
listened to voices other than her own."
Now, Streep is back on the East Coast and she seems to have put much of her
anger behind her. If Hollywood failed to nurture her as a great dramatic
actress, if she couldn't replicate Carole Lombard or Lucille Ball, Streep would
do what others have done before her: make splashy big-budget films at the
expense of riskier, more high-toned ones.
There's a certain poignancy about Streep's third decade in the business, a
decade in which she is making the trade-offs of the older star, trade-offs that
have already increased her box office value at a time when her contemporaries
are struggling for any decent role.
Her career moves have less to do with choice than survival in the Hollywood
marketplace. After all, Hollywood frightens and discards middle-aged actresses.
Some give up and retire (Jane Fonda), some play "older" parts (Sally Field was
Tom Hanks's lover in "Punchline" in 1988 and is currently his mother in "Forrest
Gump,") or dowdy, grandmother roles (Shirley MacLaine). Kathleen Turner, once a
sexy star, is now "Serial Mom." And Jessica Lange isn't working much.
"I don't have a game plan for any of it," Streep says. "An actor is always
dependent on what comes around. Certainly I am because I don't have a production
company. I have no interest or time for that. I have four kids and that's a big
development company right there. People sometimes look at my life and think this
is all effortlessly done. All these kids and it all works so easily. It doesn't.
Not at all. There's a lot of volcanic constant change involved with children and
transitions."
Why in the past didn't she seek big commercial roles like contemporaries
Glenn Close ("Fatal Attraction") or Sigourney Weaver ("Alien")? The idea seems
to appall her. "I never aimed for that," she says. "It's not part of the thing
that makes you feel good. It buys you a house. It makes your value come up in
studio discussions, I suppose. But I've never been interested. I just try to
keep working in a varied kind of way, to exercise different parts of my acting
thing.
"I never aimed for the big hit," she says, smiling. "I don't have the machine
to do that." And then she laughs. " I'm pretty aware of what I look like. I don
't look like Sharon Stone, and I'm not built like her."
For all her bravado, Streep is still edgy on the subject of her comedic
choices. She's not at all pleased with the suggestion that her role in "Death
Becomes Her," for example, wasn't quite up to her talents.
"I'm so sorry you think that," she says tersely. "You know," she continues,
"everything I do is serious even, as you said, my lighter things. To me, they
were very serious. I mean even the hyperbolic comedies like 'Death Becomes Her.'
Sure, I don't think anybody took it that way, but I liked what it was about."
(It was about women struggling to stay young via facial and body surgery).
But what about all those years squandered? Streep sighs, and smiles vaguely.
"I don't know how to respond to that."
Streep also shrugs off her past indictment of Hollywood's agism, saying that
Nicholson, a friend, complains about Hollywood's treatment of older actors. "I
've talked to him and he was saying --" she proceeds to give a good Nicholson
imitation -- " 'You women, you whine about this, you should see how many scripts
there are for 60-year-old men.' "
"If I were supercompetitive, and if I really paid attention to this issue,"
Streep continues, "I'd get more upset about it than I am. I know movies are a
function of our dream world. And when you project yourself on screen, it's
easier to project yourself into what you were, not what you are. I still think
of myself as 32, so it's easy to project that on the screen. Most men think of
themselves, you know, as in their middle 30's even when they're in their 40's
and 50's." She shakes her head. "Movies are a young person's playground.
"I'm aware that most movies are written for women in their 20's and 30's, and
these are sort of dopey parts," she says. "The ones in their 30's get the
richest and most interesting parts. And for women in their 40's, it's hit and
miss." She pauses and repeats the words: "Hit and miss."
In "The River Wild", Streep costars with Kevin Bacon and David Strathairn as
a likable Boston mother in a troubled marriage who goes on an unexpectedly
violent and treacherous white water rafting trip in the wilds of western
Montana.
The movie was directed by Curtis Hanson ("The Hand That Rocks the Cradle"),
one of the more skilled directors in the business. The filming took place over
four arduous months, on rivers near Libby and West Glacier, Mont., as well as
Grants Pass, Ore. It is, of course, an entirely new Streep: physically tough,
without an accent, without the clinical and sometimes remote acting technique
criticized by Pauline Kael, the former New Yorker critic. Ms. Kael once wrote
that Streep acted "only from the neck up" and that she was "pallid and rather
glacial." Streep says now, "It's so awful that someone you admire hates what you
do."
"The elements of outdoor river adventure were so appealing," she says. "And
here was a woman in a sort of non-victim heroic part, a mother, someone I could
relate to, who was really closer to me maybe than other things I've done.
Besides, I couldn't believe they wanted me for it. I thought they'd get somebody
younger and stronger."
Her gamble in taking on an adventure film seems to have paid off. The buzz
about her performance is strong. And studio executives and film makers are
examining Streep's skills in a different light: sure she's a great actress, sure
she does accents, but maybe she'll open a movie now, maybe the audience will
warm to her, maybe the hits will finally resume.
In August, Clint Eastwood phoned Streep at home in Connecticut and offered
her one of the most sought-after female movie roles in years, the part of
Francesca Johnson, the lonely, Italian-born farm wife in the saccharine love
story "The Bridges of Madison County." Eastwood will co-star as her lover and
direct the movie.
In accepting the role almost as soon as Eastwood phoned, Streep turned down a
last-minute offer from Robert Redford to co-star with him in "Crisis in the Hot
Zone," about real-life scientists fighting a lethal virus. Redford dropped out
of the project as soon as Streep did.
Eastwood says that he cast Streep in "Bridges" even before he saw "The River
Wild." "For some reason, everybody early in the game thought that we should find
a European gal for the part," he says. "I just didn't understand why. I felt
they overlooked the potential of American actresses, and Meryl Streep is one of
our most important." Eastwood says Streep was the only actress offered the part.
It probably didn't hurt that the buzz was so strong on "The River Wild."
For her part, Streep says that while she didn't care for the novel by Robert
James Waller, the screenplay by Ron Bass and Richard LaGravenese was first-rate.
Whatever the quality of the screenplay -- and no matter, perhaps, that the book
seems threadbare -- Streep is certainly aware that accepting the prized role is
a wise career move that could strengthen her appeal to mainstream audiences.
Although she insists that her eyes glaze over when deals and contracts are
discussed, one of her friends said that the actress is a shrewd businesswoman
with the ambition of earning as much money as possible.
Following "Bridges," Streep is set to start almost immediately on another
high-profile project, "Before and After," co-starring Liam Neeson. The film is
based on the best seller by Rosellen Brown about a New England couple shattered
by the news that their son had been arrested for murdering a girl. At this
point, Streep is aware that the turbulence in her professional life may be over.
"I emerged from 'River Wild' with a lot of metaphors for living," she says.
"Metaphors about taking risks, calculable risks, and being as strong as you can
and then just sort of knowing it's all up to fate anyway."
Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company
