June 22, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Celebrated actress Meryl Streep, the most nominated in Oscar history, is 60
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, June 22, Graphic News:  This time last year, a whole new generation of cinemagoers discovered Meryl Streep, singing, dancing and doing mid-air splits, as the ageing hippy parent brought face-to-face with her past in “Mamma Mia! The Movie”. Streep, who had once meant to train as an opera singer, belted out the Abba hits and, characteristically, went with the flow, ripping the shirt off her co-star, Pierce Brosnan, in an unscripted moment in the film’s closing scene.

Thirty years ago, in the divorce movie, “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), the Yale Drama scholar, who switched from music to acting while an undergraduate at the prestigious all-girl college, Vassar, did more than just ad lib. So insistent was she that the mother’s side of the story be more than just sub-plot, she had whole chunks of the script rewritten, adding a courtroom speech for her character which had not been part of the original screenplay. Her co-star on that occasion, Dustin Hoffman, was less than thrilled; the film was supposed to be a vehicle for him to explore modern-day single fatherhood. Streep fought for her share of the audience’s sympathy and the result was both a critical success and a box office hit, picking up five Oscars at the 1980 Academy Awards ceremony, including Best Actor and Actress for the warring couple.

Streep has said that, for her, empathy is the key to her hugely credible performances; the ability to put herself fully into the shoes of the women she plays. “I believe in imagination,” she says. “I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.”

Motherhood -- and the particular dilemma faced by one mother during the Holocaust -- was explored again in Streep’s second Oscar-winner, the harrowing “Sophie’s Choice” (1982). With her trademark attention to detail, Streep learned Polish and talked to concentration camp survivors as preparation for the title role. She’d been glimpsed, five years earlier, supporting Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave in “Julia” (1977) and found herself in another war movie, as the girl-back-home to Christopher Walken’s Vietnam soldier in “The Deer Hunter” (1978). Her real-life relationship with the dying John Cazale, who gave his final performance here, added poignancy to the onscreen grief of the small-town friends whose lives are shattered by faraway conflict.

For Mary Louise Streep from Summit, New Jersey, who’d learned her craft in repertory and caught the eye of director Karel Reisz on stage in New York, in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, the 1980s brought a rich harvest of memorable screen roles. Reisz cast her as the melancholic French Lieutenant’s Woman in his adaptation of the John Fowles novel, released in 1981. The true story of Karen Silkwood, the nuclear plant worker mysteriously killed in a car crash on her way to meet a journalist, was followed by the tale of Danish writer Isak Dinesen in Sydney Pollack’s epic, “Out of Africa” in 1985. Once again, a flawless accent -- this time Scandinavian -- was used to great effect, Streep’s opening lines becoming part of cinematic history. An Aussie twang was requisite for “A Cry in the Dark” (1988), when Streep virtually became Lindy Chamberlain -- the infamous Dingo Baby case mother. Life imitated art during filming when media interest in the making of the movie saw Streep and her co-star Sam Neill pursued by reporters to and from the set.

A million housewives wept when Streep played the long-married mother-of-two who doesn’t run away with Clint Eastwood’s National Geographic photographer at the end of “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995). The film marked a return to form for the mother-of-four who had turned down work to stay home during the week while her son and three daughters were growing up. Married to sculptor Don Gummer for the last 31 years, Streep once said when asked how she chooses her roles: “Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I’m putting out in the world, is because of my children.”
/ENDS