AMERICAN ICON: She lives on the east coast, forgoes therapy and can do accents - hardly a recipe for success in the US movie business. Yet at 55, Meryl Streep has had 13 Oscar nominations, and a day of the year named after her. Michael Dwyer meets an American icon.
It's a few minutes before noon on a bright London day, and the sun streams through the windows of a suite in the Dorchester hotel. Meryl Streep and Don Gummer, the sculptor to whom she's been married for 26 years, have just pre-ordered lunch and he unobtrusively slips out of the room as she settles into interview mode. They stepped off a transatlantic flight only a few hours earlier, but she is on alert and scintillating form, relaxed into a couch, and alternately playful and serious.
We pick up where we left off, when we last met six years ago at the Dublin Castle dinner following the Irish premiere of Dancing at Lughnasa. "Wasn't that a really great night?" she says. The film did very well in Ireland, but deserved to fare better abroad. "Oh, it was a hit in Italy, too," she says.
"That could be because it was about this big family of sisters. We beat the Julia Roberts movie that came out there at the same time, which left everyone flabbergasted." Her Donegal inflections in that movie demonstrated once again her remarkable flair for accents, a forte that sometimes has overshadowed the remarkable skill - and spirit of adventure - with which she chooses her roles and immerses herself in them. Whereas some actors play variations of themselves all the time, there is an infinite variety in Streep's output, every role distinctly different from the others.
"I welcome that," she says. "I'm so grateful that they've let me have this career. As you know, everything at home points you in one direction - once they've discovered who you are, they want to bank on that and get that the next time. So they ask: 'Why can't you be blonde in this, too? Why do you have to change your hair colour?' But, from the very beginning, I've been very lucky that the directors I've worked with have been willing to let me experiment with how I present myself in a role. That's the old rep training, you know, and back home they don't really have rep theatre anymore."
Unlike so many others back home, she never felt the need to undergo analysis because, she says, she finds it so revealing and illuminating to plunge into the lives of the fictional - and real-life - people she has portrayed on screen. "And accessing all the horrible things in me through these other people," she adds. "Acting out all these roles is a very safe way of doing that." We're not so big on analysis in Ireland. "Yes," she says, "but there is a lot of self-analysis in Ireland. You've got the pub culture and your neighbours won't ever be slow in telling you what they think."
Nor is she, as I noted at a dinner organised by Dancing at Lughnasa producer Noel Pearson after the movie's screening at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival. A very high-profile US national newspaper columnist dropped by the table to say hello to her and she promptly took him to task for misquoting her in an article a few months earlier.
More recently, the media have been salivating over her multiple performances in Angels in America, Mike Nichols's superb six-hour TV film based on a pair of plays by Tony Kushner. "Did you get to see that in Ireland?" she asks. "I'm very proud of it. Opportunities like that don't come along very often." She plays four roles in the film, one of them the ghost of the executed alleged spy Ethel Rosenberg; another entirely unrecognisable as a bearded rabbi. "That came from the play," she says, "because all the actors did a lot of doubling in the original stage version, not to save money, but to point out the commonality of human experience, by making people, who seemed outwardly so different from each other, carry the same germ of wisdom and understanding."
One scene involved three rabbis sitting on a bench. "Tony Kushner played one of them," she says, "and he roped in his and my close friend, Maurice Sendak, who's an illustrator, into playing the third rabbi. Maurice wasn't very interested, but Tony persuaded him and told him Meryl would be there, too. So we shot for a whole morning and at lunchtime Maurice asked Tony when Meryl was coming. Tony told him, 'That's her sitting next to you'."
Her performance(s) in Angels in America earned Streep a Golden Globe in January and an Emmy award last month, and she deserves to be back in the winners' circle for her latest movie, Jonathan Demme's vibrantly updated remake of the 1962 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, which is infused with an urgent topicality.
Streep brilliantly, chillingly, plays the highly successful and wholly amoral New York senator, Eleanor Shaw, who is ruthlessly determined that her son (Liev Schrieber), a decorated hero in the first Gulf War and now a senator in his own right, is selected as the vice-presidential candidate at her party's national convention.
Not since Carly Simon's teasing song, You're So Vain, has there been so much speculation about the identity of the real-life model for a subject in popular culture. Eleanor Shaw clearly is not based on Hillary Clinton, even though the character is a tough, ambitious New York senator.
"Senator Shaw is a recognisable trope," says Streep. "In fact, most of the models I looked at for the character were men. Behaviour such as hers - how she is in a room, how she takes over, how she strategises, how she leads the discussion - is just off-putting because it's done by somebody in beads and a bubble haircut. If it were a man, people would say: 'Fantastic! That guy has balls!' And balls are not attractive on a woman." I suggest that Governor Schwarzenegger of California, who recently dismissed Democrats as "girly men" might describe Eleanor Shaw as "a manly girl".
"Yes! I looked at him, too, when I was preparing for the role, because she has a charm about herself, as he does, and the arrogance is there as well." She ends all the speculation by naming her model as Tom DeLay, the Texan congressman and House Majority leader. "He's the power in Congress, the Republican muscle. I looked at him because he is the man who runs the president and keeps him on message. People such as him are animated by a kind of certainty that's just breathtaking - and yet it's what we demand from our political leaders."
Margaret Thatcher had that certainty in spades, I note, and there was something similar about Barbara Bush when she defended her son on television this summer. "Yes. They're definitely up there, too. It was a lot of fun to play a character who's so sure they're right because so many women characters are neurotic or conflicted emotionally, and this character is just so blessedly free of any kind of doubt."
As the mother of four children, the youngest of them now 13, did Streep empathise with this woman who's so fiercely protective of her son and so determined on his behalf? "I can't say I empathised with her, except in terms of her impatience to be heard in a room full of men and what it takes to really be listened to. To me, working in a business run mainly by men, it's a familiar feeling not to know how to be heard, especially early on when you're starting out. So it was a wonderful relief to play a character who comes in and runs the meeting and plays a dangerous game - but like all hubris-driven people, they tend to think they can control events that they can't, and she runs into trouble."
A vocal supporter of John Kerry's campaign, Streep was meeting the media backstage at the Golden Globes this year when she commented that the biggest problem facing the US has three initials. "I said that, but it was a joke," she insists. "It's reductive. There are lots of problems, but he's not responsible for everything. He's just the front of the ship, but basically the problem is with the ship behind him and how it's built - the underpinnings of our political process. All those themes are embedded in this film. Ireally do think that a change is coming. I hope so."
Does she believe that actors and film-makers can make a difference through political movies or public statements? "I think it's terrifying if they do, but unfortunately, that's the way society is set up," she says. "Certain people have voices and lots of people just aren't heard. I just take a personal view. I feel like I shouldn't have to hang around corners and shut up just because I am famous. So I risk having my head bitten off. I realise that's the price you pay for speaking out. The powers-that-be are all lined up to slam you for speaking your piece.
"As to whether it changes anything, well, you know that most people don't read anything any more. They really don't, but they watch the television news and so many people only want to watch "news" that reinforces what they already believe. I think the popularity of Fahrenheit 9/11 surprised a great many people, because so many people from across the political divide went to see it. It was hyperbolic, and you could have arguments with it, but there was footage there that none of us had ever seen, that the TV news did not show us."
Even though Streep chooses to live on the east coast of the US and refuses to play the Hollywood game, she is clearly admired and even loved by the film industry. She has, after all, 13 Oscar nominations to her credit - more than any actor, male or female, in cinema history. She was named best supporting actress for Kramer vs Kramer in 1979, and best actress for her wrenching central performance in Sophie's Choice three years later.
"When I get nominated for anything, I'm always shocked that I've put it over on them again," she says. "It's really just a miracle to me that I can invent these characters that seem new to people, and that they're not completely sick of me. I'm just interested in how people feel and how they react. I do understand how you get enough of a certain actor and I'm always expecting the day when that happens to me. So I'm really happy to still get that recognition. It's different for me than it would be for a young actor who gets their first nomination. To me, it means they're not sick of me yet."
She recently received a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, and in France was made a Commander of Arts and Letters. "Yes, I'm a commander now, so I command you to turn around three times," she says, giggling. And there is likely to be a 14th Oscar nomination for her performance in The Manchurian Candidate. "That would be good," she says, smiling.
She enjoyed a different accolade this year, not least as a native of New Jersey, when the borough of Manhattan designated May 27th as Meryl Streep Day. "Unfortunately, it's not a repeating holiday," she laughs. "It's a one-off." How did it feel? "Well, it got me a cab," she says. "I was leaving the function where I was presented with my plaque, and I was delighted to receive it. I went out on the street and tried to get a cab. Another woman hailed the same cab. She said, 'It's mine', and I said, 'But it's Meryl Streep Day'. So she said, 'Oh, in that case, we'll go together.' And she paid the fare! It was divine, but it was over all too soon - at midnight on May 27th."
A few weeks later, on June 22nd, Streep turned 55, so it was timely to remind her that earlier in her career she expressed the view that she would be washed up by the time she was 40. "Oh, everyone thinks that, but of course I've had some great roles since then. That's partly, I believe, because there are more women making decisions at the studios. I've done three films recently for Sherry Lansing at Paramount and I told her that she would keep me working as long as she's working. And Amy Pascal at Columbia gave me Adaptation even though the role probably should have gone to a 35-year-old. I do think it makes a difference when those ladies are in such positions at the studios, because they will say, 'Why can't you cast someone who is 45 or 50?' and it gets done."
Streep has, as she puts it, "a lot of jobs at the moment." She has started shooting Prime. "It's about an older woman played by Uma Thurman, who falls in love with a younger man. I play her shrink. The director is Ben Younger, who made Boiler Room, which was a terrific film, though not a lot of people saw it." Next up is Dark Matter, which she describes as "quite a dark subject inspired by the story of a brilliant young Chinese student of physics at the University of Iowa in the 1980s. One day he shot his mentor and five other members of the staff."
Having demonstrated a fine singing voice in Postcards From the Edge, Streep gets to perform two country-and-western duets with Lily Tomlin in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, and she plans to join Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo in Steven Zaillian's remake of All the King's Men.
"It's a very busy time," she says, "although some of my roles are quite small and will only take a few weeks." Meanwhile, due in cinemas for Christmas is Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which Jim Carrey plays Snicket and Streep is cast as Aunt Josephine. "The kids love those books," she says. "Aunt Josephine is a delicious character - so timid and such fun to play. And he is endlessly, explosively inventive. He appears in different disguises to con these orphans out of their inheritance and he fools all the adults, including my character, but the children see through him.
"He is such a massive talent, and so generous and funny and tireless. And he's so not a diva." Is she implying that other co-stars have been difficult divas? She laughs out loud and nods her head. Such as? Ensuring that not a word on this subject is recorded on tape, she coyly taps her closed mouth with a finger.
The Manchurian Candidate opens on November 19th, followed by Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events on December 17th. Angels in America is now available on DVD.