Article courtesy the Daily Mail: Ever since I was the first to see footage of Meryl Streep’s incredible portrait of Margaret Thatcher, I’ve been wondering how she pulled off the voice match. It’s uncanny. Initially, for about 20 seconds, I thought the trailer was using the real former Prime Minister’s voice. But, no, it’s all Meryl. ‘You’re talking about the best actress in the world,’ explained Damian Jones, who produced The Iron Lady. ‘She did it herself. She went deep inside Mrs Thatcher to do it. And you have to remember that the real Mrs Thatcher’s voice was different before Gordon Reece did his makeover when she became leader. Her clothes, her look and her voice changed.’ Jones added: ‘Meryl had to learn the speech pattern she had and then master how the voice became. She went on YouTube and found every bit of footage that featured Thatcher speaking. ‘And the production team found archive audio and visual footage from the late Seventies through to when she resigned from Downing Street. We gave it all to Meryl and she went to work on it.’ As I noted last week, Streep doesn’t mimic Thatcher. By observing how she stood and sat, she was able to assume Thatcher’s sensibilities.
‘Meryl does a scene in the House of Commons, and it’s so uncanny she had the cast and crew eating out of her hands,’ Jones continued. ‘The only thing she wouldn’t do was work with a dialect consultant. She finds it inhibiting. However, she did check in with the voice coach Jill McCullough, who was working with Alexandra Roach, who portrays Thatcher when she was younger. The two actresses had to be on the same page.’ The Iron Lady is tentatively due to be released on January 6 next year. Certainly, it may be shown at one or two film festivals, but the festival policy has to be decided between Pathe and Film4, the movie’s UK backers, and Weinstein Co, the U.S. distributor.
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