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STAYING POWER
Magazine / Source: The Hollywood Reporter, June 2004 |
With seven films in the works, the venerable actress shows no signs of slowing down.
By Wolf Schneider
It's hard to pinpoint when "She's no Meryl Streep" crept into the vernacular as dismissive shorthand for any actress without the chops to, say, stare down an African lion with her ice-blues, raft the rapids of Montana's Kootenai River or get high on orchid dust. But people began calling Streep "the top actress of her time" during the early 1980s, and they haven't stopped since.
Ask Jonathan Demme, who directed her in the role of a manipulative power-player in Paramount's upcoming remake release of 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate."
"I can't wait to see her in the cutting room every day onscreen -- I'm kind of obsessed with her now," he says. "This is the impact she has on every director lucky enough to work with her. She's such a hard worker; she brings a lot of confidence and a lot of concentration and, ultimately, an enormous freedom to the day's work."
Or ask Carrie Fisher how she reacted when director Mike Nichols told her that he intended to cast Streep to play Fisher in the 1990 biopic "Postcards From the Edge." "Oh, don't hire her -- she's overrated, she's awful," Fisher quips. "Get a real actress, for crissakes."
Fourteen years later, the two are sidekicks: Streep bunks at Fisher's house in Los Angeles; Fisher stays with Streep on the East Coast. They've written a script together during a long weekend at the Two Bunch Palms desert spa resort, and Streep trails along with Fisher to her hairdresser.
If anyone in the industry knows Streep, it is Fisher, who maintains: "Apparently, one of the best times she ever had during a film was (1982's) 'Sophie's Choice' -- I swear. She told me they had a great time on the set, (but) she didn't go home at night and dream about killing her children, I know that."
What is Streep's formula, then, if not being a Method actress?
"She goes by it intelligently," Fisher says. "I think she loves the characters that she does. She's very logical about them; she studies them. I know when she played me, as it were, she kind of watched me."
Aside from the logic, there's the instinct.
"She's very instinctual," says Chris Cooper, Streep's co-star in 2002's "Adaptation." "I understand she has a photographic mind where she can, or used to, memorize a script in the first or second read-through -- she never missed a line."
With a record-breaking 13 Academy Award nominations -- including two wins -- to her name, Streep still lives, at age 54, thousands of miles from Hollywood in rural Connecticut. She still has straight blond hair and a luminescent complexion onscreen, she still possesses the versatility to disappear into any role behind a pitch-perfect accent -- and she's still proving that there's nothing she can't do.
It wasn't always so easy. A New Jersey girl made good, Streep grew up middle-class and mousy-haired in Summit and Bernardsville, suburbs in which those around her would remember Streep as a bossy child. It was only at age 12, when the brown-haired, bespectacled Streep sang "O Holy Night" in a stellar contralto in her school's Christmas play, that she distinguished herself -- so much so that her artist mother and pharmaceutical executive father took her across the Hudson River to New York for voice lessons from Estelle Liebling (who had given lessons to opera star Beverly Sills).
So began the transformation: Streep dyed her hair, replaced the glasses with contact lenses, joined her high school drama club and nabbed the lead in the classic musical "Oklahoma!" She read the New Yorker, Seventeen magazine and the works of psychologist Carl Jung and got herself into Vassar College.
Upon graduation from Vassar in 1971, Streep joined the Green Mountain Guild in Woodstock, Vt. A year in rural repertory theater convinced her that she was meant for more, and she found it at the Yale School of Drama: During her three years there, Streep played 12-15 roles a year -- and got an ulcer from stress. Competing with such peers as Wendy Wasserstein and Sigourney Weaver, Streep mastered such a solid foundation of craft that by the time she hit New York at age 26 with a master of fine arts degree, she aced her first audition at Joseph Papp's prestigious public theater.
Streep appeared in an unprecedented seven plays during her first season with Papp. Her refined, cheekboned beauty elicited comparisons to Faye Dunaway, and Papp raved that Streep was the most remarkable actress he had brought to his venue.
It didn't take Hollywood long to catch on. Streep continued to perform at Papp's theater and in the New York Shakespeare Festival, and with only a year of professional stage experience, she was cast in the 1977 feature "Julia" as a bitchy friend of Jane Fonda's Lillian Hellman.
Although Streep is onscreen for only two scenes in "Julia," the role earned her the part of Linda in Michael Cimino's ritualistic 1978 Vietnam epic "The Deer Hunter." As a classy blonde who works at the Eagle Supermarket in Pennsylvania -- whose photo both Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken carry in their wallets while at war -- Streep turns the passive role of a woman waiting for something to happen in her life into something memorable. The role was so memorable, in fact, that she earned her first Oscar nomination, in the supporting actress category.
Streep's career charged into high gear in 1979 with roles as Woody Allen's hostile ex-wife in "Manhattan," as a Southern secretary in "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" and in the role that would bring her first Oscar win in 1980 -- in "Kramer vs. Kramer," in which she plays Dustin Hoffman's unhappy wife and leaves him with their toddler.
In 1981's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," a moody film set on the English seacoast, Streep shows her knack for accents. In that atmospheric romance written by John Fowles and scripted by Harold Pinter, she plays dual roles: as an 1800s English woman awaiting her lover's return in vain, and as a contemporary actress. Talk was that Fowles might have preferred Vanessa Redgrave for the role, but co-star Jeremy Irons says: "I never thought of anyone else in the role. I thought we were lucky to get her, and she was extraordinary."
Among Streep's myriad complex performances in period dramas, it was for "Sophie" that she first was acclaimed the finest actress of her generation -- and earned her second Oscar statuette. Streep beat out Liv Ullmann for the role of a Nazi death camp survivor with a horrible secret: Years ago, the character had to choose which of her children would die in a gas chamber. Streep spent three months studying Polish for the part, achieving another flawless accent.
The rest of the 1980s saw a run of top-notch roles for Streep: 1984's "Falling in Love," her first modern romance, on which she again worked with De Niro; 1985's "Plenty," in which she plays a melancholy former French Resistance activist married to a diplomat; and, most memorably, 1985's "Out of Africa" as Karen Blixen, a real-life Scandinavian writer who moved to Kenya and had an affair with a game hunter, played by Robert Redford.
"I met with Julie Christie (and) I met with Judy Davis, (but) Meryl was hands-down the choice," "Africa" director Sydney Pollack says. "She tells the story that she wore this push-up bra, and that's why I hired her. You have to trust me: It wasn't the push-up bra."
Streep got to show her humorous side in the dark romantic comedy "Heartburn" (1986), playing the Nora Ephron character married to Jack Nicholson's womanizing Carl Bernstein. Nicholson again was her leading man in 1987's "Ironweed," a movie about a pair of Depression-era drunks that brought Streep her seventh Oscar nomination. Streep's flair for accents came back into play when she perfected an Australian cadence for 1988's "A Cry in the Dark," in which she turned the line "The dingo ate my baby!" into a pop-culture catchphrase.
Around 1990, Streep moved to Los Angeles for five years and embarked on a string of comedies beginning with 1989's "She-Devil," in which she plays a romance writer. The standout from that period is "Postcards," which found her playing Fisher, a promiscuous cocaine addict with a charming streak.
"She wanted to do it, she said, because of the line, 'I can't feel my life; I see it around me, and I've seen (that) so much of it is good, and I just take it the wrong way,'" Fisher says.
Streep then continued to push herself. At 45 -- an age at which most actresses shift into the back seat and don turtlenecks -- Streep muscled up her 5-foot-6 frame for a 15-week shoot of white-water rafting in Montana as an action heroine in 1994's "The River Wild."
Actor-director Clint Eastwood called Streep next to star in the 1995 romance "The Bridges of Madison County," a role that brought Streep another Oscar nomination, and she finished the decade with 1998's "Dancing at Lughnasa" and "One True Thing" (the latter role earned Streep another Oscar nomination) and 1999's "Music of the Heart" (which earned yet another).
In 2002, Streep moved into the literary arena for two movies: She earned her 13th Oscar nomination for "Adaptation," in which she plays New York-based writer Susan Orlean, and starred in the Oscar-nominated "Hours" as lesbian book editor Clarissa Vaughan.
"Hours" co-star Ed Harris recalls of working with Streep on that film, "There's a fullness of her being -- physically, emotionally, intellectually (and) spiritually -- and she has great technique."
When Streep is not working, she's back in Connecticut, eschewing the stylists, the glamour and the blond ambition of it all. When she signs on for a project, though, Streep shows up plenty prepared.
"There's a lot of precision and exactitude in her delivery; she prepares very carefully, (and) you can't do that without the research under you," Redford says. "Her ability to play modern drama and period drama has to do with her craft, her training, her talent and her ability to really research a character -- so if it takes place in times of (Europe's Medici family) or whatever, she's going to find a way to go there and find out how those characters thought and behaved at the time."
Published June 10, 2004, © The Hollywood Reporter
