WHY MERYL STREEP TRUMPS ALL
This supposedly ‘over-rated actress’ has a record number of award nominations, writes Beverley Roos-Muller
WHEN Meryl Streep, the most acclaimed actress of perhaps any era, took on Donald Trump earlier this year for using his privilege and power to mock and attack others, his absurd come-back was that she was “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood”.
The film industry, and film-goers around the world, beg to differ. She has been nominated for more Academy Awards (20) than any other person in film history, and the list of her other accolades is the length of a red carpet (and why this book is titled, ironically,
Her Again). Yet she is one of the most private of film stars. While we are daily assaulted by the antics of “celebrities” who feel that one day out of the spotlight is one too many, little is known about Streep’s personal life: now 67, she has four children with sculptor Don Gummer and cherishes their quiet married life on their secluded Connecticut sprawl.
It seems paradoxical that, with her distinctive “Nordic” look, she has such an uncanny, chameleon-like ability to inhabit almost any role, from a sweet housewife to a bitch in Prada, from a Danish author in Out of Africa to The Iron Lady of British politics, from Shakespeare in the Park to the singing queen in Mama Mia; each time we watch her perform, we gasp – there’s nothing she can’t do.
Born in 1949, she was a “homecoming queen” in middle America, slim, blonde, smiling. Yet even as a student, her acting talent was phenomenal. While still studying on an acting scholarship at Yale, she was already starring in productions with some of the great talents of her generation: Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, John Lithgow, as well as established stars such as Jane Fonda.
Michael Schulman’s biography is of Streep’s early years. I first remember seeing her in the 1970s TV series Holocaust, in which she played the gentile wife of a German Jew, opting to accompany him in the concentration camps: the series caused a sensation in Germany, where the horror of WWII was not yet openly acknowledged, and was a part-catalyst in Germans coming to grips with their recent history.
It was in these years, the mid-1970s, that she suddenly achieved stardom, winning an Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter and the Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer, a remarkable achievement as she played a controversial role (a mother leaving her child) and Dustin Hoffman, a big star at the time, was not easy on set. As she smilingly appeared on public platforms, few knew that she had just spent the last two years of her life devotedly nursing her lover, actor John Cazale.
Best known for playing the sallow-faced, weak brother Fredo in The
Godfather I & II, Cazale was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer just months into their intense relationship. Al Pacino remarked that “I’ve hardly ever seen a person so devoted to someone who is falling away like John was. To see her in that act of love was overwhelming.”
That experience and loss was harrowing, yet her professional discipline saved her career. She believed then and now that it is unnecessary to fuse her own life with those she portrays. “Acting is not about being someone different,” she said “It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.” Type-cast as a serious actor, it was a while before producers and audiences realised that Streep could also play comedic roles with perfect timing, and sing marvellously (as a teen she took singing lessons until one day she overheard with awe her fellow pupil Beverley Sills, the great American diva). Yet those who saw her peformance in, for example,
Mama Mia, know how gifted a singer Streep is, including tackling the difficult role of the tone-deaf singing sensation
Florence Foster Jenkins, earning another Oscar nomination.
An active feminist, she sees this as an inseparable part of her art, because “both require radical acts of imagination, stretching lives to become whole human beings, however flawed”. She does not seek the limelight but it manages to find her, and she is unafraid to use the moment to speak out against injustice. “Over-rated?” How we laughed at that Trump tweet: Meryl Streep – Salute!
Each time we watch her perform, we gasp – there’s nothing that Streep cannot do.