Simply Streep is your premiere source on Meryl Streep's work on film, television and in the theatre - a career that has won her three Academy Awards and
the praise to be one of the world's greatest working actresses. Created in 1999, we have built an extensive collection to discover Miss Streep's work through an
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It happens every time the actress Mary Fisher, the man-hungry romance novelist she portrays in the just released comedy “She-Devil”. Her voice gets breathy, her face turns flirtatiously upward and then, without warning, she errupts into giggles. “Did you see it?” she asks when the talk during a recent interview turns to tabloid reports about her relations with “She-Devil” co-star Roseanne Barr. “They put my head on Oprah Winfrey’s body,” she says, sitting back on the hotel room couch straight faced, letting the image sink in before breaking into peals of laughter. She has the timing of a born comedian. As the very blond, very coiffed Fisher, Streep has at least gone comic, even campy. She sweeps onto the screen in meticulous, lavishly pink designer garb, a biting caricature of today’s aerobicized, plasticized, anesthesized woman. Ultimately, Fisher is a tragic character, as much a victim of today’s image-crazed society as her homely adversary, Ruth Patchett (Barr). Still, it’s hard to keep a straight face when talking about Mary Fisher. “Boo hoo,” Streep cries, with a sarcastic laugh, at a comment that it is Barr’s character, not Mary Fisher, who is the heroic figure of the film. Portraying Fisher in a comic fairy tale about ugly-duckling revenge is only the beginning of the surprises in store from this 40-year-old, two-time Academy Award winner, the most respected actress of her generation. In next Summer’s “Postcards from the Edge,” based on actress Carrie Fisher’s comedic book, Streep plays the wisecracking, drug-addicted actress and daughter of an aging movie star. She also sings. Superficially, at least, she says “Postcards” provides the role closest to her – how she looks, talks and acts – of her career.
That’s the joke about me, that I do all these really hard roles,” Streep says, with no trace of bitterness in her voice. Her career may be short on on-screen punch lines, but off-screen she laughs at herself and wryly comments on the worls around her. “I guess they’re sick of me,” she says of her detractors, and again she laughs. The great irony of Streep’s career is that she has transformed herself, chamaeleonlike, into such a diverse range of characters that by now these Oscar-attracting performances seem almost routine. She insists that comments that critics like Kael “mean nothing.” But she also suggests she feels some impact. “It’s out there in the air, like smog,” she says of criticism. “You don’t feel smog going into your lungs. If the day’s beautiful, you don’t notice.”
Whether her motives come from an inner drive, or are the result of the air quality around her, Streep – for now at least – is adding a new chapter to her career. She has turned the page on Lindy Chamberlain, the persecuted Australian mother in “Cry in the Dark”; on Helen, the ragged transient in “Ironweed”; on the death-camp survivor Sophie in “Sophie’s Choice”; on Baroness Karen Blixen in “Out of Africa”; on Joanna Kramer, the conflicted mother in “Kramer vs. Kramer”. Mary Fisher has arrived. It may be difficult to envision Mary Fisher as a role that Meryl Streep was born to play, but she has been preparing for it most of her life – at least since the first blond vixens crossed her path in junior high. Streep herself wasn’t immune to the demands of the beauty machine, though she may have approached it with a hint more irony than her peers.