Her turn as a steely nun in Doubthas garnered Meryl Streep a record 15th Oscar nomination. As she approaches her 60th birthday, she tells MICHAEL DWYER why she's still working hard to get it right
A WOMAN for all seasons, Meryl Streep was a diva in dungarees and a straw hat last summer in the sunny musical Mamma Mia!Now she wears a black cape and a forbidding bonnet that encircles her face in the dark drama, Doubt, playing Sister Aloysius, a nun as glacial as winter temperatures.
There's a warm glow about Streep herself, who looks radiant when we meet on a chilly Saturday morning in London. Her next stop a few days later is Tokyo for the belated Japanese premiere of Mamma Mia!"The Empress has expressed a wish to attend, and she's never gone to a premiere before," she says.
The ABBA-inspired movie has been a phenomenal success around the world over the past six months. In Ireland, only Titanichas proved more lucrative at the box office. "Oh, I'm very happy to hear that," says Streep, who has happy memories of working here on Dancing at Lughnasa.
"I saw the stage show of Mamma Mia!when I was looking for something special for my daughter's birthday," she says. "It was about a week after September 11th and the kids were all feeling so low. I took about six 10-year-olds, and the show was an absolute tonic. You just couldn't feel down in the dumps by the end of the show. I felt that there was something there that was really good."
Did she see the show as a potential movie vehicle for herself? “Oh, not even remotely,” she says with her distinctive hearty laugh. “I thought I was too old to be in the movie then – and that was over seven years ago. Then, when we made the movie, it was such fun that it seemed shameful to be paid for doing it. It was such a great cast. We were on a wonderful location in the northern Aegean. With the food and the company and where we were shooting, we had such a good time that it was more like a holiday.”
Our conversation turns to Doubt. Streep is riveting as Sister Aloysius, the intimidating principal of a Bronx school in the mid-1960s. She is so vigilant that when she suspects Fr Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of sexually abusing a schoolboy, she doggedly pursues the case in a manner that's reminiscent of the way Kenneth Starr went after Bill Clinton.
"Well, I think a lot of that case was fuelled by a great deal of money," says Streep. "Her character reminded me more of Javert, the police inspector in Les Misérables. They have a feeling about someone, an instinct, almost like a sense of smell. And I'm not sure if she's wrong.
"I have a friend who's in the security business and has dealt with celebrity stalkers. He's a very smart, interesting man and he wrote a book, The Gift of Fear. He says that women, in particular, have a kind of sixth sense, and if you feel something's wrong or that something bad could happen, generally there's a reason for it and you should trust that instinct. I think there is some kind of warning mechanism in the pheromones."
In her characteristically diligent preparation to transform into Sister Aloysius, Streep “made up a past history for her”, she says. “It’s written nowhere in the play, but for me, it was helpful to know the landscape of her life beforehand. What was her background? What happened to her? I made up for myself a biography that fuelled this kind of hypersensitivity she had, her Javert-like, laser-like certainty about this man.
“And I met some nuns from this dwindling order, women in their seventies, eighties and nineties. I visited them in retirement homes and found them completely fascinating and inspiring. At a very young age, they had given up their families and so much else, so they regarded this group of women with whom they spent their lives as their sisters. And of course, they call each other sister. They seemed content and happy. I’ve been in other old-age homes where that is not the case and the isolation is killing.”
In 1964 when the film is set, Streep was a teenage schoolgirl in her native New Jersey. “My school experience was upper-middle-class and enlightened,” she says. Although not a Catholic, she often went to Mass, drawn by its rituals. “I loved going to Mass. I couldn’t understand what people were saying because the Mass was still in Latin, and I loved the chant and that thing they swung with the incense. Then everything changed. They started speaking English and they brought in the guitars.”
One sequence in Doubtillustrates the sharp contrast between the lifestyles of priests – boisterous, drinking and smoking – and the rigidly ordered lives of the nuns. "That's the way it was then," Streep says. "I remember when I was a waitress at the one local upscale restaurant in my home town. The priests came in for lunch every day and they would start by having two Manhattans each. That's a hefty drink for 12.30 in the afternoon. Of course, we never saw the nuns there. They stayed in the convent."
Although Streep continues to act on stage when the opportunity arises in between filming commitments, given her prolific body of work, she hasn't often been tempted by movies based on stage productions. Exceptions have been Plenty, Marvin's Room, Angels in America, Dancing at Lughnasa, Mamma Mia!and now Doubt.
"I think that in adapting a play rather than, say, a novel for the screen, the challenge is for the writer," she says. "With Doubtwe were lucky to have the playwright John Patrick Shanley as our screenwriter and our director. I think that after seeing so many incarnations of his plays with different casts, he wanted to exercise more visually with it and expand it into the school. Looking at the film, I wonder how they could have done the play without these children. They are so eloquent a presence in the film.
“It’s a testament to his own imagination, and that he wasn’t hidebound or jealous about his ideas, that he was willing to expand the play and look at it from different angles for the film. Of course, I was aware of how many of my lines had been cut in the transition between the play and the film, but that was of necessity. There’s so much that can be told without words in a movie.”
When Streep had been cast as the nun, director Shanley commented that his options were narrowed in finding an actor to stand up to her as the priest.
She and Philip Seymour Hoffman had played mother and son, Arkadina and Konstantin, in a 2001 Central Park stage production of The Seagull.
“I was so happy to work with him,” Streep says. “I’ve loved him for so long in film. He really is one of our greatest actors. He’s a real shape-shifter, too. You just don’t know who’s going to come in. I know him well and he’s a friend, but you don’t know who’s going to come in the door when he does a character.”
One of the most effective aspects of the film is the absence of histrionics in the confrontation scenes between Streep and Hoffman. “The level of restraint, I think, has to do with what’s buried and is not apparent to secular audiences,” she says. “This woman seems like a dragon who’s so in charge, but she is inferior to the priest, who’s a teacher at her school. She runs the school and he coaches the basketball team, but he’s the boss ultimately.
“She reports to him and he can have her dismissed. That power dynamic is what necessitates her care and caution in approaching him. The only way she can get rid of him is by getting him to admit what he has done. It’s by dint of her own wit that this will happen, by her ability to cage him and to make him confess – which, of course, is the centre of their religion.”
Streep has already finished shooting her next movie, Julie & Julia, in which she and Amy Adams, who plays a young nun in Doubt, are cast in the title roles. Streep plays Julia Child, who was a celebrity chef on US TV in the 1960s, long before that term was coined. Is Streep herself an ace in the kitchen? "No, I'm not, but I'm getting better." Does her husband, sculptor Don Gummer, get involved? "No, I'm the cook, but he's tolerant. He's a good support. I like to cook. I didn't used to and it took a while. When you have to cook every night, I think it becomes a task. I certainly couldn't manage it after a day's shooting, when I could be working for 17 hours."
Before we part, I note that Streep will be 60 in June. “I’m looking forward to it,” she beams proudly. “I’m going to have a very big party at my husband’s studio, which is the biggest space I can think of, although he doesn’t know about it yet.”
- Doubt goes on Irish cinema release from next Friday
