Meryl Streep, and the Craft of Acting
Mary Louise “MERYL” STREEP was born in 1949 and raised mostly in Bernardsville, New Jersey. She might be the greatest actor or actress of her generation. Tennessee Williams once said that he hoped Streep would play Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
No Hollywood star can do accents like Streep. She’s played a Danish baroness in Kenya, an Italian immigrant in Iowa, a Brit, a gal from the American South, an Irish-American, a woman from Minnesota, and one from the Bronx, and sounded like a native every time. In “Sophie’s Choice” she was asked to speak English with a Polish accent, and German with a Polish accent, and pulled it off flawlessly. She was superb at voicing Eleanor Roosevelt in a documentary about the Roosevelts.
She finds British English the hardest accent to master, not because she lacks the ear for it but because something in her resists sounding like that; the intonation reminds her of an extremely pretentious American.
But her skill goes far beyond accents. She has an unbroken, dreamlike quality, and needs no dramatic staging to give her scenes power. She can make herself look frivolous or frugal, highly polished or submerged in doubt. She can fill a room with her presence or look as if she expects nothing at all from the world. She knows how to convey fluttering ambition, resentful boredom, or a hurrying joy, and none of those faces have been worn smooth by time.
As a girl, she noticed people in the neighborhood and how they moved and sounded. There was a war bride up the street, and Meryl loved the way she moved and talked, the way she spoke English with the old country still showing through.
Meryl’s mother was a strong woman who encouraged her daughter to think she could do anything. Meryl grew accustomed to performing. She sang along to Barbra Streisand records. At 12, she took opera singing lessons.
But then her father got sick and Meryl decided she didn’t like opera much, and then she discovered smoking and boys. For seven years, she was a cheerleader for football, basketball and wrestling, performing for crowds that might be thick or thin, raucous or indifferent. She was Homecoming Queen at Bernards High in Bernardsville without feeling she was beautiful, so she approached acting as a character actress, not a leading lady.
It was at Vassar College that she first got serious about theater. In 1969, she was in a production of the Strindberg play “Miss Julie,” set on the estate of a Swedish count. She learned her lines a little faster than the other actors did. She could mimic anyone she heard, and she disappeared into the part. Everyone around her sensed she had a gift for the inner surfaces of a character.
After Vassar, Streep went to the Yale School of Drama and got much more detailed, expert coaching in acting, not all of which she liked. She likes to preserve some mystery about this strange process of becoming someone else, and she felt some of the acting professors probed too much into her private self.
In 1975, she graduated from Yale, went to New York and started doing plays there. For Joseph Papp, she played in “Trelawny of the Wells” an 1898 comedy in which Rose Trelawny, a melodrama star, “gives up the stage” to marry, finds real life dreadfully dull, returns to the stage — and finds she’s become too boring to do melodrama. Then Streep played in some of Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park productions.
She and the actor John Cazale fell in love.
In 1977, Streep made her film debut in “Julia.” The medium was brand new to her, the film had a “serious” director, Fred Zinneman, and big stars: Jason Robards, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda. The Hollywood stars were in their constellations and Streep felt suddenly “as if I was lumpy and from New Jersey.” But Jane Fonda took her in hand and told her everything was going to be fine.
They did an opening take to rehearse, and then a loose, jazzy second take. Streep was feeling, ‘This isn’t so hard. I think I’m actually doing well!…’
Then Jane Fonda said, quite nicely, ‘See those green marks over there on the floor? If you do what you just did over there on your marks, then you’ll be in the light, and then you’ll be in the movie.’ It was an embarrassing comedown but later Streep appreciated how patient Fonda had been.
In 1977, Robert DeNiro saw a Lincoln Center production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and, though Streep had only a minor part as a maid, DeNiro was struck by her performance and suggested her for a part in a film “The Deer Hunter” about some young kids from a steel mill town in Pennsylvania who go off to Vietnam.
Streep wouldn’t have taken the part except that John Cazale was in the movie and he wasn’t well, she was worried about him. During the making of “The Deer Hunter,” she learned from DeNiro to care a great deal about the costume or, as she puts it, “the little detail that will tell you everything” about the character.
On March 13, 1978, John Cazale died of lung cancer. Six months later, Streep married a sculptor, Don Gummer, and it’s been a happy marriage, with four children.
In 1979, she starred in “Kramer vs. Kramer” about a family in New York going through a painful divorce and custody battle. Streep didn’t have children at that time of her life and she had to play a mother who adored her son but was disturbed enough to leave and go away with no promise of returning.
Just before she was filming an emotional scene with Dustin Hoffman, Hoffman slapped Streep very hard in the face. She was shocked and repelled. She believes a film set should be a refuge, a place where you put yourself in the hands of gifted colleagues, and actors take care of one another. The slap felt like a betrayal of all that.
Hoffman justified the slap as a way to make sure she was properly upset as they started shooting the scene. Streep has forgiven him for his calculated act of violence and won’t allow herself contempt for another actor — but she rolls her eyes when told he denies or downplays it and points out, ‘You can see his handprint on my face in that scene.’
Quite late in his life, around 1991, Joseph Papp asked Streep to meet with him. As soon as she entered the room, he told her he was dying. Without giving her time to absorb that blow, he asked if she would take over the theater when he was gone, and run it personally. It was a gesture of faith but also a stiff offer and a bad guess.
On her way home from that meeting, Streep realized both how much Papp had loved her work — and how little he really knew her, because running his theater was for someone who enjoyed standing up at cocktail parties for the rich to give a little speech asking for their money, and then schmoozing with the people who gave, to groom them to give again. None of that would have been at all comfortable for her, and any of her friends would have known that. So after that final meeting with one of her acting mentors, Streep felt both closer and more distant from the man.
In 1995, when Clint Eastwood asked her to play Francesca Johnson, the Italian war bride living on an Iowa farm in the film “The Bridges of Madison County,” Streep thought back to that war bride she’d known as a girl, and borrowed many of her speech patterns and mannerisms, to become Francesca. The film, with its treacly premise, is much better than it had any right to be, and Streep is much of the reason.
She’s quite a feminist and believes the old patriarchal order can’t crumble fast enough. She asks Why is there no National Museum of Women? Why is women’s history largely invisible? She wants men to feel something is deeply wrong when male voices dominate discussion.
She thought the original “Kramer vs. Kramer” script wasn’t sympathetic enough to her character and, at the screenwriters’ suggestion, she wrote a long speech for her character. In later years Streep was a bit defensive about the speech she wrote. When directors said warily that they’d heard she “changed her lines,” she’d say quickly that she’d been ASKED to write that speech in “Kramer vs. Kramer.”
People tell her, ‘You’ve played so many strong women.’ She’ll agree but points out that no one tells a male actor, ‘You’ve played so many strong men.’ When people ask, “What kind of part do you like to play?” she says she likes to play women who were difficult for those around them to understand because then you’re exploring the part; you keep trying to make the pieces of the person cohere. She enjoys the challenge of playing a stifled woman or a woman who recklessly gives her gifts away.
She also points out that she had to fight to play a romantic lead in “The Bridges of Madison County” because studio executives thought that, at 45, she was “too old” to play Francesca Johnson. But no one thought Clint Eastwood, at 65, was “too old” to play the male lead.
“Silkwood” is a muckraking movie about corporate malevolence and Streep plays a worried, plainspoken Oklahoma woman in a plutonium processing plant. In “Death Becomes Her,” she plays black comedy and is vain, vindictive and funny. In “River Wild” she’s a credible action star in an adventure picture that morphs into a crime thriller.
“Sophie’s Choice” (1982) might be her most striking performance. She grabs the movie and dominates it, playing Sophie, a woman broken, defiant, yielding, sweet, bitter, sexy and in mourning, all at once.
How do you it? people ask. What’s the secret of acting? Streep is apt to withdraw a little from the question. Technique only gets you so far. The pane of glass through which she sees the character is opaque to her at the time and, in retrospect, clouds further.
But a first step is to remind herself that this woman she’s playing is not someone different from Meryl, but “a part of myself.” Her identity is elastic enough to find that true. She makes sure she is freely expressing emotion, then finds how to do that in character. Each women she plays wears certain traits and duties like a suit of armor, heavy but protective. Each character also seeks to escape what they’ve been. Streep moves back and forth in the role, between duty and liberation.
Colleagues of Streep see someone superbly alert to others in the scene, an actress of grit and grace who treats each “take” as an experiment, full of information to be filed away. There is always another mood she can pull out, another rhythm, another tone, always some margin to work with.
Streep is also very good at seeing where her character is at her peak, and where in the depths, and she can lift them up and drop them down, with a sudden magic.
In “A Cry in the Dark” (1988), Streep plays an Australian woman accused of murder after her child is attacked by a dingo in the outback. The accent was a new one to tackle but more interesting was Streep’s decision to be so cold while playing a woman innocent of the crime of which she’s accused. Here she chose NOT to express emotion freely — yet it works.
She rarely watches her old films and never rates them against each other. So much can be blurred, forgotten, or misremembered. If she was challenged and learned something, that’s enough. She feels the need to act but not for the sake of awards. She once won an Academy Award, and left the statuette in the ladies room.
To women who ask her advice, whether in show business or outside, she will say ‘Don’t worry about your weight. Don’t worry about being too old. Don’t worry that certain people may not find you beautiful. It’s losing heart that you have to worry about. Losing heart is the most dangerous thing.’