Meryl Streep

[jexxica]

Cinemania Argentina September 2006

my scans

 

[kobro22]

^Thank you for the scans jexxica, always nice to see something new in the Meryl thread.

 

[YoninahAliza]

New interview with Meryl from The Talks

Mrs. Streep, do you like to cook at home?

Some nights I like it, some nights I don’t. I’ve started meals and then just said, “Oh God!” and thrown it in the sink. I have done that and said, “We’re getting pizza, that’s it.” And then I’ll go lie down in my room in a funk. When my children were very young and I was working I had someone cooking for me. I don’t have a cook now, I haven’t had one for a number of years and I do it myself. But when they were all little it was hard to pay attention to everyone’s homework at the end of the day and make dinner.

So what is your specialty today?

Lately I’ve been making a lot of pasta. It’s easy. There are unusual tastes that you can combine. I cook because my kids like a certain kind of thing and then they want it over and over. My daughter now likes pasta with cauliflower, fresh parsley, tarragon, and ricotta salata. So you boil the cauliflower and then you put the pasta in the cauliflower water, so you cook it until the flavor goes through. Then you just toss all the other things fresh.

How do you combine a very consuming career and motherhood?

Well, the first thing is a great husband. That I found many years ago and I am lucky in that way. And then you have to have a lot of stamina. And you have to have very good organizational skills. I feel like I run a business although I haven’t one. It’s planning, planning, and planning.

How do you feel about your children going into acting as well?

I am proud that my daughters want to do this. But I am also frightened for them, too. Because when criticism comes your way as an actor they are not criticizing your writing or your painting or your piece, they are criticizing you! It is hard to put that away in a place where you are not hurt by it and that is my fear for them. But I would never say don’t do it, because I think it is a glorious profession and I am so thankful for everything it has let me express.

My impression is that you always seem to be quite happy. Is that really the case or is that your public persona?

I am not always happy. I am happy in front of the press. I can be extremely grumpy, ask my husband. (Laughs)

What makes you happy?

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple: love, sex, and food! Everything else – power, influence, strength – all those things can overpower what’s important in life. But as long as you have food and shelter over your head, if the necessities are taken care of, what makes us happy on top of that is very simple.

That point of view is often connected to the way people were brought up. Are you much like your own mother?

My mother was someone that walked into a room and lit it up. She made friends easily and she communicated her enthusiasms with great joy. I always wanted to be more like my mother than I am. I loved and admired her very deeply. She chose to see the best parts of life and didn’t choose to look at what’s wrong and what’s holding her back or anything negative.

Have you ever envied anybody in your life?

Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah! I envied Jessica Lange when she got Sweet Dreams. That was such a great movie; she was beyond wonderful in it. I wished for things that I haven’t had, but I have to say my blessings are pretty great, so I have no complaints.

Sophia Loren once said she hates you because you stole her part in The Bridges of Madison Country with your acting skills.

Well, I don’t think Sophia hates me because I just met her for the first time in my life at the last Academy Awards and she gave me the most wonderful embrace and she made me very happy. I am such a fan of hers and a great admirer of hers and always have been and so is my husband. He has never recovered from that moment where she came out of the sea. (Laughs)

Do you like your image as the “go-to” actress for serious dramas?

I’ve always done all sorts of things all along the way. Whatever film you first appear in, however people first perceive you, it’s like the first impression coming in the door and that’s the thing you are associated with. The first few things that I was in were dramas, but in drama school I was never in a serious or realistic play. No, there was just one. I was in The Father and I played the young daughter. Everything else were comedies for three years. But that was the time.

You have worked with Hollywood’s elite. Who was your favorite director?

I don’t have a favorite director just like I don’t have a favorite color or I don’t have a favorite food. I like everything. There have been directors that I did not enjoy working with, but for the most part I realize that I have been unbelievably spoiled in my career because I have worked with some of the greatest, greatest directors ever.

Is there anybody you never had the chance to work with but still would love to?

Yes, I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long. There are also a lot of wonderful directors that I would love to work with again. I love Spike Jonze. I loved working with Wes Anderson, but I was a fox, so I would like to work with him as a human some time.

Are you, the great Meryl Streep, ever afraid of roles?

You can’t do your job and be afraid. You can be afraid in a press conference, nervous, sweaty, but you can’t be afraid when you do your work because it doesn’t work that way.

So you never get nervous anymore?

I get nervous the more time I have to think about something so I deliberately don’t give myself too much time between jobs. I take a big break and then I start working again usually.

http://the-talks.com/interviews/meryl-streep/

 

[Not Plain Jane]

Great interview, THANKS!! I love what she says about Scorsese - so true! And I hadn't really thought about it.

 

[kobro22]

Thank you so much for that interview, and I love that she has th guts to tell it like it is about Scorsese!

 

[sobriquet87]

This woman is flawless! And yes, Scorsese is brilliant, but he definitely should consider have a female lead at least once.
The same can be said for other directors as well.
Women are much more complex/interesting than men you would think it would easy for them to come up with intriguing/realistic female characters.

 

[alicia753]

Love this interview! Meryl is wonderful!!

 

[kobro22]

This woman is flawless! And yes, Scorsese is brilliant, but he definitely should consider have a female lead at least once.
The same can be said for other directors as well.
Women are much more complex/interesting than men you would think it would easy for them to come up with intriguing/realistic female characters.

With Scorsese its even more than that all his female characters since The Alice movie (witht he brilliant Ellen Burstyn) have been one dimensional. I love MEryl for pointing the finger at MArtin Scorsese since he is so powerful in Hollywood and nobody criticises him.

 

[Flashbang]

A review of 'The Iron Lady' from dailymail

Many feared the worst when they heard Meryl Streep was to play Margaret Thatcher in a new film.

Not only was Baroness Thatcher to be cast as a rather befuddled, elderly woman looking back on the triumphs and disappointments of her life, but Streep is also of a very different political hue from Maggie.

It was commonly agreed that our greatest Prime Minister since Churchill would be vilified.

Such fears are misplaced. Having just seen the film in a London preview before its release in January, and then having spoken at length to Meryl Streep about her role in The Iron Lady, I can state categorically that the doomsayers were wrong.

Streep’s portrayal will, I have no doubt, come to be seen as magnificent portrait of Lady Thatcher.

And when I spoke exclusively to the double Oscar-winning actress about playing her, she declared herself to be in ‘awe’ of Lady T, adding that this was the biggest role she had undertaken in her career. ‘It took a lot out of me, but it was a privilege to play her, it really was,’ she told me.

‘It was one of those rare, rare films where I was grateful to be an actor and grateful for the privilege of being able to look at a life deeply with empathy. There’s no greater joy.’

The 62-year-old star, who was in London to see the completed film, explained how she admired Thatcher’s willingness to stand and be leader, a decision which meant she had to offer her life, and her family’s, ‘on an altar’ to the public good.

‘I still don’t agree with a lot of her policies,’ said Streep. ‘But I feel she believed in them and that they came from an honest conviction, and that she wasn’t a cosmetic politician just changing make-up to suit the times. She stuck to what she believed in, and that’s a hard thing to do.

‘She’s still an incredibly divisive figure, but you miss her clarity today. It was all very clear and up front, and I loved that eagerness to mix it up and to make it about ideas.’

Of modern politicians, Streep added: ‘Today it’s all about feelings. You know, “How do I come off?” and, “Does this seem OK?”.

‘You want people who are willing to find a solution. I admire the fact that she was a “love-me-or-hate-me” kind of leader who said: “This is what I stand for.” It’s a hard thing to do and no one’s doing that now.’

There are moments in the film which will give today’s leaders pause for thought. At one point, in an imaginary scene set in the present, Thatcher is at a dinner party where she declares that she does not agree with having a coalition government.

In another powerful moment, she decries the lack of ideas in politics and insists that politics should be about thoughts that lead to actions. It makes David Cameron and others seem like pygmies with all their focus groups telling them how they come across to the country.

The film, directed by Phyllida Lloyd from a screenplay by Abi Morgan, who wrote the recent BBC drama The Hour, is told from the point of view of Lady Thatcher living in London several years after the death of her beloved husband Denis (played by Jim Broadbent and, in his younger years, Harry Lloyd).

She’s being urged to get rid of Denis’s things, his clothes and effects. Poignantly, his set of golf clubs still stand by the bedroom door, and she hallucinates that she can see and talk to her late husband. As she goes through his things over a three-day period, memories of the highs and lows of her life come flooding back.

The film opens with a scene of an old lady wearing a headscarf walking to her local shop for a pint of milk, and as the camera zooms in we are startled to discover that it’s Lady Thatcher. She returns home to have a conversation with an imaginary Denis about the price of milk — a shocking 49p.

Although such moments are affectionately done, some might feel they are intrusive. An invasion of a great lady’s privacy.

But for Streep such scenes were as powerful as sequences involving world events or Mrs Thatcher handling the Miners’ Strike or the decision to sink the General Belgrano.

‘The decision to let go of your husband’s things after he’s gone is a very hard thing,’ said the actress. ‘These decisions you make in your personal life are as profound as any decision about the Falklands. Everything counts. In a big ambitious life, everything counts’.

The film is also a love story. It makes it clear that despite the difficulties of living in the public spotlight — especially when the twins Mark and Carol are born (we see both as young children, but only the adult Carol later; Mark is at the end of a phone) — Margaret and Denis adored each other.

There are fictionalised scenes suggesting The King And I was her favourite musical, and there are three instances of Denis and Margaret waltzing to the show’s famous Shall We Dance number.

 

[Flashbang]

....dailymail

When Streep was cast to play Mrs Thatcher, there was an outcry. How could an American actress possibly capture the nuances and sensibility of a woman raised above a grocer’s shop in Grantham? How could she possibly understand the issues of class and politics that Thatcher had to rise above to achieve her ambition?

Well, only an actress of Streep’s stature could possibly capture Thatcher’s essence and bring it to the screen. It’s a performance of towering proportions that sets a new benchmark for acting, a searing interpretation that looks at the big forces that shaped Mrs T’s life.

Interestingly, some Left-leaning people might think it glorifies her. At the screening I attended, I sat next to a woman who, once upon a time, canvassed against Thatcher, yet by the end of the film she was so touched she was in tears.

The film’s certainly not the Left-wing propaganda many feared when the movie was first announced more than two years ago.

Streep noted that, when Mrs Thatcher was elected leader in the Seventies, ‘we on the Left didn’t like her policies but secretly we were thrilled that a woman had made it, and we thought, “Wow, if it can happen there in England, it could happen here.” But we’re still waiting in America.’

Warming to her theme, she added: ‘I do think it’s something to do with sex. I do think it’s a deep unease about women being in power, and even though I think I’m taller than most men, it’s the littler agenda.

‘It’s about the head man. There are vestiges of people thinking women are not as bright and not as capable, and I think Margaret Thatcher knew that and so she over-prepared to make sure she knew everything that would ever be asked of her, and be ten times more prepared than any of her colleagues — which probably annoyed them.

‘But that’s what it took to get there and to stay there. It’s astonishing what she did, but it took stamina, which she had plenty of, and guts. But there was also a cost in her private and professional life.

‘I think of that Spitting Image puppet of her with its eyeball coming out and I wonder really what does it feel like to be a person represented by that. To be a leader willing to take the level of hatred for the decisions they make, I really do stand in awe of that.’

The actress spent months watching and listening to videos and broadcasts so she could get a sense of Mrs Thatcher’s body language and voice.

During a House of Commons scene, when Mrs Thatcher is Edward Heath’s Education Secretary, her accent is ridiculed and an opposition backbencher shouts: ‘The lady doth screech too much.’

Later, there are scenes where her political mentor Airey Neave and media strategist Gordon Reece convince her to lower and deepen her voice and to give herself what they term ‘important hair’.

Streep wears several wigs in the film and in the more contemporary scenes she wears prosthetic make-up to age her. The look is so astounding that at one point I felt the producers had somehow obtained private home footage of the real Lady Thatcher.

Streep should win an Oscar for the Thatcher voice alone, not just for the incredible transformation.

The film focuses on episodes in her life and premiership including the Miners’ Strike, the Brighton bombing, the Falklands and her firmness in Cabinet, which led to charges of bullying. Her final days in office are depicted as a tragic opera where the heroine is banished in tears.

The Falklands scenes might stir some controversy. ‘Sink it!’ she demands when told that the General Belgrano might be steaming towards our carriers.

But she’s not cold and unfeeling. When her own men are killed, she writes to the families, telling them that their sons ‘did not die in vain’. The screen Thatcher talks of the tough decisions she had to make for which she would be hated but perhaps understood years later.

Then Denis pipes up with: ‘Or forget you entirely and chuck you out with the rubbish.’

Twenty-one years after she left office, Mrs Thatcher is far from being forgotten. To some she has become a feminist heroine, a political giant. To others she’s still loathed for her divisive policies.

Damian Jones, The Iron Lady’s producer, believes it is Mrs Thatcher’s ‘bloody-mindedness’ that has ensured she has endured as an icon.

‘She is bloody-minded British,’ he says. ‘I think there are traits in her that, whatever your politics, people acknowledge as being part of our national character’.

There is no doubt that Maggie will always be remembered for being resolute and for helping to make Britain great again. And now she’ll be remembered, too, for being brilliantly portrayed by Meryl Streep.

The actress was making a short trip to London to see a completed version of The Iron Lady and she had also requested to meet women newspaper commentators from across the political spectrum and to discuss their views of Thatcher.

She also attended last night a special event hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,the folk behind the Oscars, honouring Vanessa Redgrave.It was held at the Curzon cinema in Soho, central London with David Hare, Ralph Fiennes, Eileen Atkins and other major actors.

 

[liberty33r1b]

^thanks so much for posting that article. i was just watching the trailer to the movie and really can't wait to see it in january. hope she'll win an oscar for her role!

 

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[YoninahAliza]

Wow. I knew Meryl would play Thatcher well but I didn't think she would have me tearing up during the trailer. The film looks like an honest portrayal of England's first female PM. Thatcher, whether or not you like her politics, you have to agree was a strong women who stood up for what she believed in even if other's didn't agree with her. And from the looks of it Meryl captured the essence of Thatcher perfectly. Looks like she's getting another Oscar nom!

 

[kobro22]

I cannot wait to see this movie, another fantastic role by the great Meryl, I really hope she wins, she is due for another Oscar it has been years since her last win.

 

[alicia753]

daily mail

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[pavonine]

The early reviews are mixed, but all of them are unanimous in praising Streep's performance. If it's released in December, she may well be a forerunner for the Academy Awards.

 

[alicia753]

daily mail

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[marjanthelion]

corbis

 

[kobro22]

SHe will definitely score a nomination, although the movie itself is getting mixed reviews all critics are unanimous in saying Meryl is brilliant (as always) and she did Thatcher justice.