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DEVIL IN DISGUISE
Magazine / Source: The Sunday Herald, October 2006 |
Despite the self-confessed paranoia about her career, Meryl Streep is still scoring strong roles. And after decades of making audiences cry, she’s nowrenjoying flexing her comedy muscles. She talks to James Mottram about juggling, mothering and bitching in The Devil Wears Prada.
MERYL Streep has a dirty laugh. A sort of throaty schoolyard snigger that unashamedly trails her sentences. Okay, we’re not talking Sid James here, but I think this is important to know. After all, on screen, at least, the 13-time Oscar nominee is not known for her ability to laugh, let alone her sense of humour – despite once voicing Bart’s girlfriend in an episode of The Simpsons. From her breakthrough role in 1978’s The Deer Hunter onwards, it was just too easy to fall into the trap of believing that life in the Streep household was one long funeral procession. Such is the aftermath of playing so many traumatised women so convincingly.
As she enters a basement hotel room during a promotional tour at the Venice Film Festival, Streep is anything but dour. She almost floats into the room, sighing in a la-di-dah way that rather recalls Woody Allen’s creation Annie Hall. It’s not a flamboyant entrance, but a low-key one – the perfect summation of her as a person and an artist. Carrying a clunky cream handbag and wearing blue-tinted spectacles that give her a rather spinster-like air, her only ostentatious accoutrement is her silver Blackberry phone, which she places on the table. If you had never seen her on screen, you’d walk past her in a flash – such is her ability to melt into the background.
Last night, Streep was centre of attention at the European premiere of her latest film, The Devil Wears Prada. A movie set around the fashion world requires suitable attire and Streep was wearing a slick Valentino suit, outshining even her young co-star Anne Hathaway. “I borrowed it and returned it this morning,” she shrugs. “I don’t have a life that needs a suit.” Fashion is not important to her, she says. “But how people put themselves together is very interesting to me and always has been – when I was in college my degree was in costume design. So it is interesting to me how a character is revealed through little details and clues in their clothing.”
In the case of Streep, her outfit today suggests modesty. Designed by British-born Alice Temperley, it’s an aqua-blue dress laced with cream webbing – entirely befitting of a woman of Streep’s class. But then Streep is not one for clutter. “There are people in my profession who live so removed from all the exigencies of their lives,” she says. “It’s not good for me not to know how to be capable in my own life. How could I play anybody? How could I be an actress? How could I know what it is? Layers of staff … entourage, the whole thing, I don’t like it.”
If you need any proof, aside from the fact Streep must be the only Hollywood actress who doesn’t own a production company, just ask her where she keeps the two Best Actress Oscars she won for the troubled mothers she played in Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice. “Up on a high shelf,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “One of them is a really terrifying colour now.” A well-known fact that the gold leaf on the statues peals away after a while, I point out that the Academy will restore it to its former glory for her if she wishes. “I suppose you could,” she sighs, disinterest flooding her voice.
Now holding the highest number of Oscar nominations after beating the previous record holder Katharine Hepburn, Streep – once dubbed “my generation’s genius” by Diane Keaton – says she distances herself from all the adulation deliberately. “I find myself removed from it, but probably for self-protection and all the reasons of trying to be human and have an ability to move into different characters,” she says. “It doesn’t serve me well to have a label like that. It doesn’t help me in any way. I put it over there.” The only time it ever comes up, she says, is on the first day of a new project “when the new young actors are scared of me, until I forget my lines, which happens almost immediately, and then they go, ‘Oh, she’s not so hot!’”
In The Devil Wears Prada, based on best-selling novel by Lauren Weisberger, a former Vogue intern who loosely fictionalised her time under legendary editor Anna Wintour, Streep plays Miranda Priestly. The sharp-tongued editor of so-called fashion bible Runway, Priestly takes on Hathaway’s clueless journalist student as a personal assistant, only to frequently dress her down with a series of jibes that would put a stand-up comic to shame. Streep fervently denies she modelled her own performance on Wintour. “That was not something that even vaguely attracted me … to impersonate somebody. I didn’t learn anything about her. I don’t know anything about her and I won’t ever know anything about her.”
Portraying the most fearsome female boss since Demi Moore clambered on top of Michael Douglas in Disclosure, Streep was drawn to playing a woman with power – an aspect she recently touched on in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate in her role as a scheming senator. “There is a big difference between how men and women are perceived in positions of leadership, so that was one of the reasons I wanted to do the film,” she says. “It interested me very much as to whether the world is ready for women to lead and can take direct orders from women, or whether they find it offensive. It reaffirmed what I felt in the beginning, which is that women are still held to a different standard.”
A marvellous performance from Streep – witty, acerbic and yet vulnerable – her take on Priestly is also is a fair indication of her skills as a comic improviser. “The attraction was being able to mould it myself, and add humour,” says Streep. “There wasn’t really a lot of humour in this character. I think my Miranda is self-aware when she’s saying something. Like when she says, ‘Where’s my coffee? Did she die?’ She knows that’s funny, but it was me that added that second sentence.” Of course, it raises the question does Streep have a PA and how does she treat her? “Oh, I have a personal assistant … who’s my boss!” At this point, she lets out that dirty laugh of hers.
While Streep might claim she has been taking comic roles for years – as far back as 1989’s She-Devil and the Robert Zemeckis-directed Death Becomes Her three years later – it’s only recently that she’s consistently been trying to make us laugh. Films such as the playful Adaptation, in which she featured as real-life author Susan Orlean, saw her get high by sniffing green plant extract; or Prime, in which she entered in Jewish mother mode. Then there was Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, in which she played the grammar-obsessed wicked aunt. “That is what’s financed now,” she argues. “People don’t want to see dramas. I would ask what films you’ve seen that have serious roles for 50-year-old women in the lead, that maybe I should have done instead of these comedies?”
At this point, there’s a buzzing from her Blackberry. “Maybe this is my daughter,” she mumbles. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been waiting for this call.” In fact, it’s a text, one that Streep studies intensely. “Mmm… yes. Okay. Oh-Kay.” She looks up. “She lost all her jewellery. Not that she has much, but her graduation necklace, she left on the aeroplane. See, this is what happens … okay.” It’s interesting watching Streep snap back into domestic duties in an instance. She doesn’t mention names, but I’m guessing this must be Grace, the third of her four children. Her youngest, Louisa, is not yet 16, while her older offspring, Henry and Mamie – both of whom have begun acting – left college some time ago.
Married for 28 years to sculptor Don Gummer, Streep claims it’s her family life in Connecticut that keeps her normal. “Everything is a balancing act in life, and everybody has to have a sense of humour about what it takes. Really, being an actress in film, if you have a certain amount of success – even if it’s moderate success – you have a life that’s friendlier to your family because for large parts of it you’re unemployed. So you’re home. I’m home more than most working mothers. It’s the equivalent of flexitime … except I’m employed and I think I’ll never work again. And then I get another job and I work for four months, and then I stop.”
This is where it makes you realise that living with Streep may not be such a breeze. The world’s greatest living actress she may be, but she freely admits that she is beset by paranoia. Firstly, there’s the feeling after every job that she’ll never work again, something she claims every actor feels. “There are little dry periods when you think, ‘F**k, I’ve lost it!’ and then you get something else. But I’ve saved my money and I’m all right. When I was younger, it was more terrifying, though I don’t think I ever had a good sense of how on the edge of the abyss I was. You have optimism when you’re younger, and I wasn’t afraid.”
Then there’s the fear she gets when she takes on a role. Perhaps it’s because Streep often pushes herself to the wire – whether it’s mastering a Polish accent and dialogue for Sophie’s Choice or learning to play the violin in two months, practising for six hours a day, in 1999’s Music Of The Heart – that she starts from a place of terror. “I doubt myself,” she admits. “When it comes to start, I just fall apart – I think: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t have a character. I don’t know why I’m here. Why did they hire me? Why did they want me to do this? I don’t know how to do this.’ It’s really weird. I’ve done it for enough years that my husband has pointed out the pattern and said to me: ‘You always do this.’ I say ‘No, I have never felt like this. It’s this project.’ He just goes on the golf course to get away!”
Noting their differences – he rarely accompanies her to watch theatre in New York, one of her passions – Streep is swift to point out that their marriage is based on a mutual understanding. She credits him for a motto she lives by: start by starting. “It’s the most valuable thing he’s ever given me, better than any piece of jewellery. It’s fantastic. He’s totally right. I think it’s really a good thing. And when I do that, I make the first mark, I commit somewhere to something. But the really weird thing about acting is you can’t get ready to do it, you can’t do it before you do it, and you can’t do it in the trailer or your home. You can only do it in the moment it’s happening.”
Born as Mary Louise, Streep was raised in suburban New Jersey, the daughter of Harry, a pharmaceutical executive and Mary, a commercial artist, both of whom have passed away in the past five years. The eldest of three – Streep’s brother is now a choreographer; her sister a bond salesman – Streep admits she was a show-off as a child, who enjoyed being the centre of attention. Yet even then she would wear a sweater to ‘feel’ more like her character. When she got older, and joined the school choir, she had ambitions to be an opera singer, and trained with the renowned vocal coach Estelle Liebling. Shy and quiet as a teenager, it was only when she was 15, receiving a standing ovation for her role as the librarian in a school production of The Music Man, that she clicked with acting and began to come out of her shell.
Winning a place at the prestigious New Hampshire all-girls college Vasser, Streep studied music but switched to acting because she hated the theory aspect to the former. After she graduated in 1971, and spent a summer with a travelling theatre company, she enrolled in Yale’s School of Drama, where she would hone her craft. By the time she returned to New York in 1975, she made an almost immediate impact when she joined Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. Papp, the first of many to notice her talent, described her as one of the few “true actors” he’d ever met.
Within a year – now calling herself Meryl – she had made her screen debut in Julia, as a bitchy friend to Jane Fonda’s character. The following decade saw her deliver a string of credible performances in adult fare that audiences warmly embraced. From her dual role in the 1981 John Fowles adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman to her Danish baroness Karen Blixen in Out Of Africa, Streep may not have made us laugh, but she sure knew how to make us cry. In the Nineties, while her successes were more sporadic – notably, her one sublime collaboration with Clint Eastwood in The Bridges Of Madison County – it can be argued she was widening her range. Aside from her aforementioned comic forays, she even played the feisty damsel-in-distress in action-adventure The River Wild.
Currently filming First Man with Robert De Niro – a comedy in which she plays another power-hungry role, the US president – Streep can next be seen in Robert Altman’s lightweight A Prairie Home Companion. It’s a typical ensemble piece from the veteran director, based around the famed US radio show of the same name devised by author Garrison Keiller.
“There’s something about the world that Garrison creates that locates a place in Americans’ childhood,” says Streep. “We grew up listening to the radio in a more innocent time. So for me, it was really great to locate something true about America, something about the heart of it, and something that cuts across all levels of sophistication and humanity about who we are as Americans. That’s why I loved being in it.”
Yet despite this feeling for comedy, and the dirty laugh, Streep has not entirely lost her serious side. She recently played in the Brecht play Mother Courage And Her Children in New York’s Central Park – a summer gig that lasts just a few days and is free for audiences. “It’s the greatest anti-war play that’s ever been written,” she says. It was also a rare opportunity to catch her in the theatre now. “I don’t go on stage much,” she says. “I have so many children and they always have a drama of their own.” So has she ever considering not acting at all? “Oh, sure,” she says. “I always think, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to write and illustrate a children’s book or go fishing for a whole fall?’” Somehow, I can’t see her ever giving up acting for that; like her much-loved children, it’s just too much in her blood.
The Devil Wears Prada opens on October 5
