|
THE DEVIL IN MS. STREEP
Magazine: Miami Herald, June 2006 |
Meryl Streep was 13 years old the first and only time she saw Ship of Fools, director Stanley Kramer's drama about a group of people traveling on an ocean liner from Mexico to Germany. The actress says she can barely remember anything about the movie, except for one thing, which she will remember for the rest of her life.
''It had Simone Signoret, who did not look like a traditional movie star. She was a fat woman,'' Streep says. ``But as the movie went on, I started to realize that she was capable of being very sexy and falling in love and all those things, and still look like that. I had made a decision about her at the start of the movie based on how she looked, and then I changed my mind as I watched her.
``That was very big for me -- that moment when your little blinking self starts to wake up and mature, and you start to develop an ability to appreciate complex contradictions in people.''
That ability, of course, famously found its way into Streep's day job. In The Devil Wears Prada, which opens Friday, she plays Miranda Priestly, the editor of the influential women's fashion magazine Runway, where she wields the power to dictate trends, make or break designers and shape next season's haute couture, all on the merest of whims.
The movie, which centers on Miranda's systematic terrorization of her new, fresh-faced, fashion-challenged assistant (Anne Hathaway), is based on the dishy roman clef bestseller by Lauren Weisberger, who once worked as an assistant for Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour. But whether out of respect or fear of getting blacklisted, the filmmakers have gone out of their way to ensure everyone knows any similarities between their Miranda and the real-life Wintour are purely coincidental.
''I know the book was based on an assistant's-eye view of Anna Wintour, but it didn't interest me to do a documentary on Anna Wintour,'' Streep says. ``I don't know anything about her. I've even only met her once, at a benefit auction screening of the film. She came to it and we were introduced at the very beginning, and she was a good sport about it. But I think she's been told that I don't resemble her. It's much more fun for me to make the uber-boss out of my own pastiche of experience.''
Instead, Streep's character -- who wears her white-gray hair in a defiant swoosh, treats her staff with a casual disregard, and is prone to saying things like ''Please bore someone else with your questions'' when her secretary tries to clarify something -- is based primarily on men.
''Unfortunately we don't have enough women in power to copy, or at least I don't know them,'' she says. ``And compared to the people that I know in our business who are very powerful, Miranda is so well-behaved she's almost like a diplomat.''
The most surprising thing about Streep's performance, however, is that she never allows Miranda to become a monstrous shrew (even her voice is a soft, gentle lilt). Although the movie is a boss-from-hell comedy, with most of its laughs stemming from Miranda's often cruel and unreasonable treatment of others, Streep plays the character straight -- as a driven career woman, wife and mother of two who has attained a position of power through hard work, and simply expects her staff to maintain the same professionalism. If that means people think Miranda is a bitch, so be it.
''I know a lot of people think she is that,'' Streep admits. ``But I was just interested in making a human being who is as contradictory and messy as we all are. She's an exacting, highly disciplined, demanding, ambitious person who doesn't necessarily take the time for all the nice social lubricants that help make the workplace graceful and fun. From Miranda's point of view, she wants to excel at every level, and it's very hard. But people have to make their own decisions about what they want from their lives and what will make them happy and satisfied. There is a kind of career path that demands certain things not everybody wants to give.''
Streep herself, of course, has chosen to have both a career and a home life. But the most honored actress of her generation -- and perhaps in all of Hollywood history -- has managed to do it without becoming embittered. Clad in a flowered-print blouse and dark slacks as she sits in a Manhattan hotel suite for a round of interviews, Streep, 57, looks relaxed, at ease and still strikingly beautiful. The mother of four children and wife of 28 years to sculptor Donald J. Gummer, she has also found time to volunteer with several national charities and even stumped for 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry.
All that, without ever really taking a sabbatical from acting ever since graduating from the Yale School of Drama in the mid-1970s. Long past the age where most actresses start taking roles out of desperation, Streep has managed to keep on landing parts that show off her range. Pegged as a dramatic actress at the start of her movie career through roles in The Deer Hunter, Julia, Kramer Vs. Kramer and The French Lieutenant's Woman, Streep is now seen as capable of pretty much anything: The musical comedy of A Prairie Home Companion, the genre-defying whimsy of Adaptation, the action-adventure of The River Wild, the inspirational uplift of Music of the Heart, and, of course, the affecting drama of The Hours, The Bridges of Madison County and HBO's Angels in America.
The only way to keeping so many plates spinning, of course, is compromise. But unlike Miranda, Streep says she's never made any that she regrets.
''But I have made all sorts of compromises, like every single day,'' she says, laughing. ``Sometimes it's whether to shower or not, because you don't have time! Miranda would not make that choice. But if you have a very thickly populated home life, and then a career that's demanding, something always comes up short. I've always felt stretched to the max, but also very lucky and nourished by both things, my family and my career. But it's always a struggle and you always feel like you're letting somebody down.''
One person who always felt let down by Streep was the late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who constantly derided the actress' tendency to favor dramatic roles, called her an ''`automaton,'' and in her review of Sophie's Choice (which brought Streep her second Oscar) wrote the infamous line ``Streep is very beautiful at times, and she does amusing, nervous bits of business . . . but something about her puzzles me: After I've seen her in a movie, I can't visualize her from the neck down.''
Streep is familiar with the line and with the persistent criticisms leveled at her by Kael, who passed away in 2001.
``I do remember it, and I also remember the next week after she wrote that, she wrote a long -- I don't even know how to say this word, paean? -- to Dyan Cannon as the greatest actress of our time. So I put those two things together in my heart and figured out what her problem was. It's all so personal. [Pauline] was a little Jewish girl growing up in Northern California, going to Berkeley, and she's surrounded by all these golden California girls who are also very smart. And she's very smart, too, but she's gotta figure out how to cut them, how to cut her own path. Because everything's personal, and with women, so much has to do with their perceptions of how they look.
``I have no doubt Pauline had that, too. I think presented with The Deer Hunter, [the TV movie] Holocaust and Kramer, she decided that's who I was -- this blond Ivy Leaguer, whatever the uniform of Meryl Streep is. But that doesn't reveal the person underneath. She only saw the easy thing. She was writing a book about acting when she was older, but we've never seen that book. I'd really, really love to read it. Because I'm sure there's more in there that would help me understand her and her biases, because they were so clear. And she stuck to them no matter what.''
