|
MERYL'S MAGIC, DOUBLY DISPLAYED
Magazine: Philadelphia Inquirer, June 2006 |
NEW YORK - Meryl Streep is screaming.
"NOBODY LISTENS TO ME UNLESS I RAISE MY VOICE!" she shrieks in wake-the-dead mode, ensconced in a hotel high above Central Park, while a troop of publicists circle the floor outside, doing the clockwork dance of a Hollywood media junket.
But Streep - who holds the record for the most acting nominations in Oscar history (13, she's won twice) - isn't being a diva, a prima donna, a bring-me-a-Kleenex-now! star.
She is simply demonstrating a point, explaining how she came to play Miranda Priestly, the fearsome fashion editor of The Devil Wears Prada, without speaking above a hush.
"That was a definite decision. A lot of the most powerful people I know speak very, very quietly," she says. "I mean, in my house, if I don't speak at a certain decibel nobody listens to me at all. They say, 'Why are you screaming?' And I say, 'Because I've said this seven times, NOBODY LISTENS TO ME UNLESS I RAISE MY VOICE!', and it's absolutely true, in my house.
"But my grandmother... she could look around the table and just raise one eyebrow and everybody knew to pay attention. I always thought, why can't I just raise an eyebrow and get this reaction?
"Anyway, it was in deference to my grandmother - and also Clint Eastwood, who never raises his voice - and other people that I've known who are pretty powerful."
And Anna Wintour, the real-life editor of Vogue, arguably the most powerful woman in the world of fashion? Whether or not Wintour - nickname "Nuclear" Wintour, for her infamous icy demeanor - speaks that way, Streep doesn't care.
"I didn't feel like replicating Lauren Weisberger's version of her," says Streep, referring to the author of the roman a clef on which The Devil Wears Prada, which opens Friday, is based. "I just felt like, ugh, that's too many layers of interpretation. I just want to do it myself. And I just like having the freedom to do that, because when actors feel free, then they do their best work."
In the film, Anne Hathaway plays Weisberger's fictional alter ego, a serious J-school grad who takes a job as second assistant to the all-powerful editrix, and finds herself immersed in a strange universe where the gods have names like Badgley Mischka and Dries Van Noten, and the goddess - Streep's Miranda - strikes fear in the hearts of all who cross her path.
Streep, who turned 57 on Thursday and made her screen debut almost 30 years ago in Fred Zinnemann's Julia, has two movies out now. In addition to Prada, which Twentieth Century Fox moved to its summer slate after seeing director David Frankel's rough cut earlier in the year, the actress is part of the gabby crew of A Prairie Home Companion, Robert Altman's down-home homage to Garrison Keillor's radio show.
Streep plays one-half of the singing duo the Johnson Sisters (Lily Tomlin is the other), and the mother of a budding chanteuse, played by Lindsay Lohan.
Wearing her hair long, blond and mussy, and waxing wistful about the glory days of her crooning career, Streep's character is a far cry from the Prada-suited titular terror of Devil, with her designer glasses and shock-of-white coif.
"We did Prairie Home Companion in July and started this in August, and it couldn't have been more different," she says. "I had one costume fitting for Prairie Home Companion and flew off to St. Paul. I had one day of singing with Lily, and then was thrown on the stage, and nine days later was put in the car and said, 'Thank you, bye!'
"And then we came back to New York and I went through three weeks of six-hour-a-day fittings. It was like boot camp: standing in four-inch heels all day long - just that alone is a challenge."
The actress decided with her longtime makeup man, Roy Helland, how Miranda Priestly would look. Frankel, the director, who made his feature debut with 1995's Miami Rhapsody, has helmed episodes of the HBO hits Sex and the City and Entourage. He says that when Streep showed up with her wig and her sotto voce delivery, he was, well, surprised.
"She was very covert, which is her way," Frankel says. "She was adamant that we not see the process... . She went off and she worked with our costume designer and she made some decisions about the wig. We tried to have a conversation about it, and she just absolutely would not do that. And I had to respect that. After all, she's Meryl Streep."
The executives at Fox, however, were less than thrilled. There were grumblings that she looked too much like the villainess from 101 Dalmatians. "Going in we thought, gee, we don't want the character to be campy," Frankel says. "We don't want people to go, 'Oh, she's Cruella De Vil,' and make it less than it should be as a result.
"And the white wig seemed to be going right at that. But maybe that's part of her genius, because now people do mention Cruella De Vil, but in a good way. Meryl trusts herself, she trusts her talent so much, to transcend people's preconceptions. And I think that's amazing, that she has that confidence. And she's earned it."
Streep, with a jolly cackle, puts it another way:
"I didn't talk to David about the character of Miranda, I just came in and did it. I mean, that's the advantage of being Meryl Streep."
She found out only after the fact that she had caused a big brouhaha. "They were all flipping out about the choices I'd made with the hair and everything, but... I just did what I wanted."
And how long has it taken her to develop that sense of certainty? She didn't start off doing theater, waiting tables in New York between jobs, with that kind of confidence, did she?
"Well, in the spirit of hubris and arrogance in which I come to work and have always come to work," she says, wryly, "I don't think I ever worried that the choices I made were somehow wrong. I thought if they hired me, well, then they should know... .
"I remember when I went down to Texas to make Silkwood, I had just finished Sophie's Choice and I had met Mike Nichols in New York to talk about doing Silkwood... . I think we wrapped Sophie's in Zagreb and I flew home and had a week off and then I flew to Texas and saw everybody for dinner. Then Roy and I went into the hotel room and I just stripped my hair and made it brown.
"I came to Mike the next day and he just about had a heart attack, because he had fallen in love with this image of Cher and me, the dark and the blond, and now I had done this and he was appalled.
"But there was just no question in my mind that it had to be. I didn't think about asking permission."
Streep's busy these days. Never mind trying to get the attention of her family - husband Donald Gummer, a sculptor, and four kids, three of whom have already followed in Mom's footsteps. (Her daughter Mamie, 22, won a Theater World award for her New York stage debut in Mr. Marmalade.) She's been flying back and forth from her Manhattan home to Salt Lake City, where she's midway through Dark Matter, a drama about Chinese students studying in the States. This summer, she'll return to Central Park's Delacorte Theater - the open-air stage where the young Yale grad made her first big splash in New York - for a production of Brecht's war drama, Mother Courage and Her Children. And there are several film projects slated for the fall.
Emily Blunt, the English actress who makes her winning American movie bow as Miranda's No. 1 assistant in Prada, walked into the first read-through in awe of the actress.
"I don't think it was an easy thing for her to wake up every morning to play Miranda Priestly," says Blunt, 24. "Meryl is quite a gregarious person and she's got a great, raucous laugh, and she had to adopt a certain reserve on set in order to maintain playing this rather soulless woman. It was impressive to watch, because the rest of us were complete hams and having a good old party."
Did working closely with Streep give Blunt any insight into the process, the method, of this grande dame of stage and screen?
"She doesn't have a method, I think. It's whatever she does in the best way she knows how. All of us would love to know her secrets. Everyone wants to know Meryl's bag of tricks.
"Everyone kind of asks themselves before a scene, 'How would Meryl do it?', and none of us really know."
