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ADAPTABLE MERYL STREEP
Magazine / Source: The Toronto Star, December 2002 |
Meryl Streep is beginning to sound like an automobile salesman.
"I drive a Toyota Prius and I can't figure out why everyone else doesn't," she announces during an interview to promote her appearance in director Spike Jonze's quirky new drama, Adaptation, which opens next Friday.
Streep, 53, can't boast enough about the new hybrid vehicle, which runs on a combination of electricity and gasoline and gets a whopping 51 miles to the gallon. "You people pay so much more in gas than I do," the actress continues, her voice rising with eagerness. "You spend so much more money than I do ... and I make more money!"
That's because Streep, a graduate of Vassar College and the Yale University School of Drama, is considered by many critics to be among the most talented actresses in the film world, and by filmmakers to be a box-office draw.
Since her breakout performance in the 1977 drama Julia, Streep has won two Best Actress Oscars: for Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979 and Sophie's Choice in 1982.
She has also been nominated and lost another 10 times — a Hollywood record.
"I know you won't believe me, but I don't count how many nominations and I don't remember how many I have had," she says, between sips of bottled water. "I just know I would like to have one more, because I have one child who has never been (to the Academy Awards ceremony)."
Nominations will be announced on Feb. 11, 2003, and Streep is hoping that on that morning she gets a nod for at least one of her two current performances.
First up is Adaptation, the semi-autobiographical story of real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (he co-wrote Being John Malkovich with Spike Jonze), who becomes so frustrated trying to adapt a book to the big screen that he inserts himself into the script.
Streep portrays journalist Susan Orlean, whose book The Orchid Thief — expanded from a magazine article for The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer — is the source of Kaufman's problems. Kaufman is played by Nicolas Cage.
In January, Streep will also appear with Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore in The Hours, a film adaptation of Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which riffs off Virginia Woolf and her book Mrs. Dalloway.
Streep declined to meet with Orlean in preparation for the Adaptation role. "I didn't want to be diverted by the truth."
"I have only been a movie extra once in my life and it was on The Deer Hunter, starring Meryl Streep," Orlean says.
"So it somehow seemed like karma that she was going to play me."
The two women were eventually introduced at an early screening of the film, prompting Streep to observe, "She's a lot like me. She has serial passions."
Streep, who was named an Officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2000, is referring to the tendency to immerse herself in her work.
She still talks about studying six hours a day for eight weeks in a row to learn to play the violin for the 1999 movie Music Of The Heart.
"It's very intoxicating to hurl yourself into this safe, dangerous place that acting is," she says. "It is safe because you go home at the end of the night and you didn't really murder someone, for example, but you really got to experience the feelings of what it would be like."
Streep (whose birth name is Mary Louise) got her first taste of show business at age 12, when she began training with celebrated vocal coach Estelle Liebling, who previously taught diva Beverly Sills.
Growing up in Summit, N.J., with two younger brothers — Harry, a choreographer, and Dana, a bond salesman — Streep gravitated toward opera. But at Bernard's High School, she still found time to join the cheerleading squad, and was even elected homecoming queen.
Once a waitress at the Somerset Hotel in New Jersey, Streep has credited Charlie's Angel Kate Jackson with helping get her career off the ground.
In the years since, she also formed a unique "child support group" with other actresses, including Annette Bening, Carrie Fisher and Tracey Ullman. They each took turns watching each other's children when they were younger.
Streep has four: Henry, 23, Mary Willa, 19, Grace Jane, 16, and Louisa, 11. Don Gummer, her husband of 24 years, is a sculptor. Not far from their northern Connecticut home is the actress's 93-year-old father, who became widowed last September.
"I do spend a lot of time caretaking," she says. "If I live that long I will consider myself to be very lucky. I feel quite young by comparison."
In the past, Streep has given some of the credit for her youthful vibrancy to yoga. "I used to do it every day and then I stopped two years ago," she says, with a smile.
"One thing I am not is consistent ... But I have started again."
She's also back at work, filming a six-hour movie version of Tony Kushner's Angels In America: Perestroika for HBO, starring with Al Pacino. It's her 62nd time in front of the camera. But despite the awards and critical acclaim, Streep acknowledges that not all of her films have been successes. (Think She-Devil with Roseanne Barr.)
"I have picked the weirdest little group of personalities," she says, lowering her voice and head in tandem.
"But I think they all deserved to have a life and I am glad that somebody was willing to bankroll them."
