THE RANKING

Four Empire writers argue the toss about the greatest actor on the planet

Dame Meryl of Streep.

Chris: So, this is our first actor Ranking. Meryl Streep holds the record for most Oscar nominations with 347. Where do we stand on her filmography? Is she overrated, underrated, or just rated?

Ian: I don’t think you can overrate Meryl Streep. I think she’s the best actor in the world, without doubt.

Helen: I think she’s stunning.

Ian: You could do another top ten other than the one we’ll come up with and it would still be as strong. Strength in depth.

Chris: That’s interesting. One of the things I found when I was putting this together is that there aren’t that many stone-cold classics. I think sometimes her performances are considered, years later, to be better than the films in which they belong.

Nick: Have you seen The River Wild? It’s the film Deliverance could have been.

Chris: It’s not in my Meryl Streep Top Ten. It is in my David Strathairn Top Ten. We’ll be doing that Ranking in October of 2034.

Ian: There is something in that, though, in that she’s the best thing in the things that she’s in. There might be a sense that she overshadows things.

Helen: [Doubt director] John Patrick Shanley talked about it once in an interview. He talked about how she likes to win the scene. This was his take on it. His perception was that she likes to win the scene and [co-star] Philip Seymour Hoffman had no interest in playing the game.

Nick: May I quote Cher?

Helen: Always.

Nick: Cher said in the ’80s, “Meryl Streep is an acting machine in the same sense that a shark is a killing machine.” I don’t entirely know what Cher is talking about, but that seems to fit what you’re saying. She is ferocious. She prepares to an insane degree. On a technical level, she’s phenomenal.

Chris: All she does is eat, sleep, and make little Oscars.

Helen: One of the things I struggled with in putting together a top ten was deciding how much weight to give her comedy roles. I think she’s great fun in Death Becomes Her, I think she’s astonishingly good in A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Yes, I said it. I just love her in that. I think she’s so funny. But I went a bit Oscar-y and didn’t give them as much prominence as I maybe should have.

Nick: There are not a lot of laughs in the late ’70s/early ’80s Meryl filmography. I added them up. There’s half a laugh in total.

I spent the last four or five days watching as many Meryl Streep films as I could, mostly from that early period. And they are depressing as hell.

Chris: Sophie’s Choice.

Nick: The most depressing by far. The plot for that is almost ludicrously depressing.

Helen: Sophie is so delicate.

When you first see her, she looks like a harsh wind could blow her away. That’s not what I associate with Meryl Streep. It’s a very different role to The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Out Of Africa. The only thing those three have in common is accents. She was famous for her accent work at one point.

Ian: Which does her a disservice. She’s brilliant and nuanced and real, and all sorts of things that go beyond accents.

Nick: But I can’t think of any other actor who has done Australian, Polish, Irish, British, Danish, which she learned from Jeremy Irons’ nanny. The list goes on and on and every single accent she nails.

Ian: Her Margaret Thatcher is very good as well.

Chris: Her comedy work was a reaction to being pigeonholed as this Oscarhoovering dramatic machine, I think. She’s been nominated for 21 Academy Awards, winning three, most recently in 2012 for The Iron Lady. Before that, a long barren streak.

Helen: “Barren”. It was punctuated by regular nominations, which many actors would kill for.

Chris: It was 29 years between Oscars. She won Best Actress for Sophie’s Choice

in 1983, and her first one in 1980 — she won for Kramer Vs. Kramer, in which she plays Kramer.

Ian: You’d swear that she would have won for Out Of Africa.

Chris: The Post, most recently. Ian: Deserved.

Chris: I feel very strongly that’s a ‘well done for being Meryl Streep’ nomination.

Helen: Absolutely not.

Ian: Could not be more wrong.

Chris: 2007, she was nominated for

The Devil Wears Prada. I can’t think of many more iconic Meryl Streep roles.

Ian: It’s a brilliant use of her persona. When they’re getting ready for Miranda Priestly to come into the office, they’re also getting ready for Meryl Streep to come into the office. It feels like that.

Helen: It’s a terrific film, and significantly better than the book on which it’s based. The film feels like Wall Street with girls. That’s why that performance works as well as it does. She’s basically Gordon Gekko for a different generation.

Nick: I’m surprised there hasn’t been a sequel. She hasn’t done many sequels. ‘The River Wilder’, come on! Chris: ‘Kramer Vs. Kramer Vs. Godzilla’? Nick: In fact, Mamma Mia! will be her first sequel. Here We Go Again.

That’s a good title.

Helen: I don’t think she’s in it much. Ian: She’s dead.

Nick: That won’t stop her. If anyone can play a singing ghost, it’s Meryl Streep.

Ian: You can argue she’s the auteur of a lot of these films. Even if she did not initiate the project, you feel the juice of the project is coming from her.

Chris: Her first [Oscar] nomination was in 1979 for The Deer Hunter.

Ian: She’s not in The Deer Hunter

a lot, but what I like about that is it’s Meryl Streep playing ‘normal’.

Nick: Silkwood, she plays someone pretty normal. I really like that film. It’s really naturalistic.

Chris: Ian, I know you like

Manhattan. Do you consider that to be a Meryl Streep film?

Ian: No. But she’s terrific in it. She’s in a couple of scenes and that’s enough to warrant inclusion.

Nick: I wouldn’t include Deer Hunter or Manhattan because she’s not in them enough.

Helen: I felt, like Nick, that they weren’t Meryl Streepian.

Chris: Okay. Enough squabbling, let’s vote!