And even more pictures from the “Great Hope Springs” set, taken today, have been added to the gallery.

Here’s a very first look at Meryl Streep in character on the set of “Great Hope Springs” in Connecticut. Edit: With many thanks to Martine, lots of additional pictures have been added!

According to this source, “Great Hope Springs” begins filming its scenes in Stonington next week, according to borough Warden Paul Burgess, and will continue until the following week. The shooting schedule, which was not finalized by Thursday afternoon, will not be made public, he said, due to security and crowd-control issues. Streep and Jones will be in the borough, but not comedian Carell, who has already shot his scenes inside his movie-set therapist’s office. “All of those office scenes have already been filmed in Norwalk,” said Burgess. Much of the film work will be done inside, but Burgess said it will still be obvious what is going on. This is not the first movie that has been at least partially shot inside Stonington’s borders. “Remains,” a post-apocalyptic zombie flick being produced for the “Chiller” network, was shot in Mystic earlier this year. More famously, “Mystic Pizza,” the movie that launched Julia Roberts’ career and still brings tourists to Mystic, brought Hollywood to Stonington in the late 1980s.

Here’s the official poster for the upcoming “The Iron Lady”. Doesn’t it look great?

Here’s a little tidbit from an interview with Abi Morgan, who penned the script for “The Iron Lady”, in The Independent. While the article is mostly about the British series “The Hour”, she briefly talks about working with Meryl on “The Iron Lady”.

Another Morgan-penned feature to be released in the new year is The Iron Lady, the hotly anticipated Thatcher biopic starring Meryl Streep. She found the actress to be hugely impressive: “I worked a little with her and she’s just amazing: so finely tuned in decision-making. The great gift of an actress like her is that she’s very down to earth, and true to what she does.”

According to the Connecticut Post, scenes for the movie “Great Hope Springs” will be shot in Milford later this month, an employee of the production office said Monday; she declined to say what locations will be used. The movie, which has a December 2012 release date, is using Mystic and Stonington as its principal locations, but has also shot scenes in Norwalk and Darien. Ellen Woolf, the production director of the state Office of Film TV and Digital Media, referred questions to the Norwalk office of GHS Productions. The movie is one of four now filming in Connecticut, according to the state Department of Economic and Community Development which includes the film office.

According to Movieweb, “Outsourced” star Ben Rappaport has joined the cast of Great Hope Springs for Sony Pictures. The story centers around a married couple (Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones) who try and rekindle their relationship by seeking therapy from an unorthodox guru (Steve Carell). Ben Rappaport will play the married couple’s son. David Frankel will direct Great Hope Springs from a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor. Mandate Pictures is financing while Sony will release Great Hope Springs in North America. Lionsgate will handle international sales. A concrete release date has not been determined yet, although the studios are eyeing a fourth quarter 2012 premiere.

Actress Jean Smart has been cast as Meryl’s best friend in the upcoming “Great Hope Springs”, according to an interview with this source. Smart has won praise during her lengthy career, mostly for her television roles on “Designing Women”, “24” and “Samantha Who?”, the latter winning her an Emmy Award in 2008. “Great Hope Springs” is currently shooting.

In its 19/26 issue, Entertainment Weekly has previewed the highlights of the 2011 movie season, and of course, “The Iron Lady” is featured. The scan can be found in the gallery with many thanks to Alvaro!

As mentioned and explained by visitors from the UK before, British newspapers are pro and contra Thatcher, so this might be a reason for such diverse press coverage on “The Iron Lady”, as summarized by the Los Angeles Times: If controversy equals box office, then “The Iron Lady,” Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher biopic, is off to a promising start across the pond. According to a report in the British newspaper the Daily Mail, friends of Thatcher who attended an early screening of the film Saturday were outraged by its portrayal of their former prime minister as power-hungry leading up to and during her administration in the 1980s and conflicted and confused in her senescence. “I didn’t come here to see a film about granny going mad,” one anonymous viewer said of the movie, which is directed by Phyllida Lloyd (“Mamma Mia”) and stars Streep as the Conservative leader and Jim Broadbent as her husband, Denis Thatcher. According to the report, “The Iron Lady” contains scenes of Thatcher suffering nightmares over some of the major victories of her tenure — including the 1984-85 coal miners’ strike that lead to a weakened labor movement in Britain and the 1982 Falklands War — and sacrificing family for ambition. Viewers took particular offense at the depiction of the Thatcher marriage, including a scene in which a pink-turbaned Denis appears in a dream sequence to rail at his wife for her selfishness. Conservative MP Conor Burns told the paper: “Any portrayal of Margaret Thatcher that does not show her as one of the titans of British politics in the 20th Century will be a travesty. The idea that Denis would ever have been cruel to her is twisted and untrue. They were devoted.” Their article continues here.