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STREEP IN CONTROL FOR MANCHURIAN ROLE
Magazine / Source: BBC News, August 2004 |
By Chris Heard, BBC News Online entertainment staf
Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep has told of her challenging role as a ruthless politician in new US thriller The Manchurian Candidate.
Streep stars as senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, a powerful political mover determined to get her son (Liev Schreiber) elected as vice-president.
Her character has been compared by some critics to former US First Lady Hillary Clinton and ex-UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Speaking in London on Tuesday, Streep said the role was "a great opportunity to play someone and understand someone not like me".
"We are touching on something very deep about 'mummy' and the fear of her taking over," said Streep.
"Everyone here thinks it's Margaret Thatcher. Everyone at home thinks it's Hillary Clinton, because these are the most formidable women in political life. So people have their fears but those two women couldn't be more dissimilar from each other.
"It was really unusual for the first half of a picture that a woman drove the plot and the dynamics of the machine of the story so forcefully and aggressively and terrifyingly."
Streep plays the ambitious, domineering mother of congressman Raymond Shaw, a Gulf War veteran afforded hero status after saving the lives of his crew in a tank ambush in the Kuwaiti desert.
Shaw's former army colleague Major Bennett Marco, played by Denzel Washington, questions Shaw's heroics in a series of dream-like flashbacks, and sets out to prove a conspiracy behind his push for the White House.
Marco is convinced that sinister mind control tactics are at play - but is roundly discredited as a paranoid fantasist suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.
At the same time, his attempts to prove the involvement of the mighty US corporation Manchurian Global are dismissed as further delusions.
The film is a tense, taut thriller whose contemporary themes seem bound to chime with the mood of some American citizens in the aftermath of 11 September.
It is a remake of the 1962 original of the same name, starring Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, based on a Richard Condon novel adapted by George Axelrod.
Where the "dark forces" of the new film take the form of global capitalism, the first version had communism as its bete noire.
Streep, in London to promote the film's forthcoming UK release, said she had not watched the 1960s film before taking on the part.
"I decided not to look at it because I thought I might steal something from Angela Lansbury and she wouldn't appreciate it, or I would be affected by the performance in some way," she said.
She said the influence of money on policy-making as portrayed in the movie was a long-standing theme - "something that's in America that our founding fathers worried about".
Streep, aged 55 and a mother of four children, said she believed the availability of acting roles for women over 40 was increasing.
"Things are changing," she said. "...The emergence of all the cable opportunities through HBO and Showtime reach a great many people and some of the most exciting work is now happening in these versions on TV."
To laughter from journalists, she added: "It's hard for some studio bosses to cast women who resemble their first wives."
Streep appeared relaxed and at ease as she answered questions at a press conference at the Dorchester Hotel in central London.
Wearing a black and white patterned designer top and black trousers, her light hair swept back above small black round spectacles, she laughed and joked with reporters.
Of her two Oscar statues - received for Sophie's Choice and Kramer vs Kramer - she said: "I keep them very high up on a shelf. One has begun to discolour horribly so I should take it down and polish it up."
Asked to mimic Glaswegian accents from conversation during her son's time at Glasgow University, she said there was "none repeatable".
She said her daughters listened to advice "sometimes, but not on sartorial matters at all".
As she spoke about her interest in film costume, she apparently spotted a price tag still attached to her top, and said she was "incapable of dressing myself".
When asked whether she would ever have plastic surgery, she said: "I remember that Catherine Deneuve said after a certain age you can have your face or you can have your ass, it's one or the other. I have chosen my face. I am going to sit on the other."
