Meryl has walked the blue carpet at the London premiere of “The Iron Lady”. A total of 162 pictures has been added to the image library. Update: 74 more pictures have been added.

A new US featurette for “The Iron Lady”, featuring a bunch of new and extended scenes from the film, has been added to the video archive. And a couple of new pictures from the set have been added as well. Check back later today for coverage on the London premiere.

According to the Chicago Tribune, “The Iron Lady” proved her mettle this weekend. The biopic opened to a remarkable $280,409 at four theaters — a per-screen average of $70,102. That’s the third-highest specialty opening of the year, after “Midnight in Paris,” “The Tree of Life” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” The movie will expand to more theaters January 13. “We couldn’t be happier with the results,” Erik Lomis, the Weinstein Company’s distribution chief, told TheWrap on Monday. “Obviously it’s the number one screen average by a mile for the weekend.”

This will be the last update for this year (with the exception of the “Year in Review 2011”, coming next week) and I’ve made sure you’ll have plenty to watch, read and listen to for the Holidays. First, Meryl’s appearance on “The View” can be watched in the video archive.

She attended the show yesterday alongside director Phyllida Lloyd, dishing on “The Iron Lady”, her early years at Dartmouth college and visiting the White House for the Kennedy Center Honors. Additionally to the video, HD captures have been added to the gallery.

Then, new magazine scans have been added to the gallery, with many thanks to Alvaro. Transcripts can be found in the magazines archive as well, including articles from Sunday Times Culture, The Inquirer, MacLeans’, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. A list of all new scans can be found below the previews.

Image Library > Magazine Scans > 2012 > Empire Magazine (UK, February 2012)
Image Library > Magazine Scans > 2011 > New York Magazine (USA, December 12, 2011)
Image Library > Magazine Scans > 2011 > Sunday Times Culture (UK, December 11, 2011) (transcript)

Finally, I would like to wish all visitors of Simply Streep a Merry Christmas and some wonderful Holidays with your family, friends and beloved ones. It’s been a great year to keep Simply Streep updated and I’m looking forward to all the news and things to happen in 2012. Have a great time and take care everybody! Frederik.

A B-roll video from the set of “The Iron Lady” has been released, showing lots of footage from behind the scenes. Also, two additional clips have been added to the video archive. Enjoy!

She wears the mantle of world’s greatest living actress lightly, apologizing when her dress gets askew and flashes a bit of skin, and admiring photos of your child before sighing that “it all goes so fast, so fast.” And, she’s quick to point out, there’s not a bounty of juicy roles for even her out there. “There aren’t that many movies around, available. There aren’t that many movies written that I could do. Sometimes they’ll take a villain’s part and turn it into a woman. There aren’t a lot of parts. There aren’t a lot of serious movies,” she says. “That’s all right. I like comedies, too.” But once in a great while comes a part so multidimensional, so delicious, so revelatory as to be irresistible. Such was the case with The Iron Lady, which stars Streep as Margaret Thatcher, the polarizing, controversial British prime minister who served from 1979 to 1990. Read the complete article at USA Today.

Meryl Streep has won the Southeastern Film Critics Association Award as Best Actress for “The Iron Lady”. Today, she also received a nomination as Actress of the Year by the London Critics Circle Film Awards – a further nomination went to Olivia Colman in the British Actress of the Year category – Colman plays Carol Thatcher in the film. Meanwhile, “The Iron Lady” won two awards by the Women Film Critics Circle Awards – Best Movie by a Woman (tied with “We need to talk about Kevin”) and Best Woman Storyteller for Abi Morgan. For a list of all recent wins and nominations, have a look at the Awards & Nominations category.

NPR has an interesting radio interview with Meryl Streep and Phyllida Lloyd over at their website. The Iron Lady sets itself apart from many other biopics in that it tells the story of a woman who is still alive and still a divisive figure. Phyllida Lloyd, the film’s director, tells NPR’s Melissa Block that she was moved to tell Thatcher’s story because of how larger-than-life the former prime minister is. “It’s a sort of mythic story of somebody who came from [a] very humble background to somebody who became a global superstar and then was brought down, as she saw it, by the treachery of her colleagues,” Lloyd says. “It’s a sort of Shakespearean tale.” You can listen to the full interview here.