MSO: Meryl Streep Online

Excerpts From the Special Tribute Honoring Meryl Streep
from the Telluride 25th Anniversary Yearbook (September 1998)
Written by: Mary Desjardins / Modified by: Myla Kent

All photos © Bonnie Lippel.
Meryl is seen during a Q&A session at the Festival.
Meryl is pictured with Rosanna Arquette and No Man's Land star Katrin Cartlidge (seen on Meryl's right) who died suddenly at the age of 41 (September 10, 2002). The British actress, who played a TV reporter in the Oscar-winning Bosnian movie about life on the frontline during the Balkan conflict, is believed to have died of complications resulting from pneumonia and blood poisoning. Cartlidge was a regular collaborator with UK director Mike Leigh, and appeared in several films following a stint in TV soap Brookside. She starred in From Hell, Topsy-turvy, Before The Rain, Career Girls, Naked and Breaking The Waves.

Meryl Streep pops up in the middle with her own video camera. Turning slowly full-circle and talking for the mic, she gushes like an ingenue, "Look at who's here!" Indeed. Look at who is here at the noon seminar across the street in Elks Park. I'M LOSING YOU's Rosanna Arquette, AUGUST 32ND's Pascale Bussières, CLAIRE DOLAN's Katrin Cartlidge, and the same Ms. Streep, who has brought her new film DANCING AT LUGHNASA to be screened later today. The subject is roles for women, good roles for women beyond the "kid" stage. As she does wherever she appears throughout the weekend, Streep dominates the conversation with wit and insight. Ranging widely, Meryl says that James Cameron "did women a huge favor, without knowing it, because women went to see that movie, not to see the ship sink, but to see Leonardo sink, and to weep and sob and feel deeply." She says she made THE RIVER WILD because she wanted her own girls to see a women "heroic physically. I would kill for my girls. So I guess the character would, too. Acting is like flying," she says. ". . it's just fun. Mothering takes every ounce of your imagination, everything. It's an unrecognized art. That's why I made that movie."

A woman from the audience stands at the microphone with a question: "I'm 66. Last year I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. To whom should I send my script for a strong woman of 50?" "Send it to me," Streep cries. "You're my hero!" People feel a connection with Meryl. The woman Annette Insdorf has called "the greatest female actor of her generation" has, apparently, completed her unassuming seduction of Telluride.

You are a remarkable person,
Miss Woodruff.

Yes. . I am a remarkable person.
Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in
The French Lieutenant's Woman

Few critics or movie lovers would object if the fictional Mr. Smithson's passionate observation were directed at Meryl Streep herself rather than at character Sarah Woodruff, the 19th century British woman determined to invent herself out of the romantic longings left from an unhappy love affair with a wounded and womanizing French lieutenant. Streep's remarkability is not only registered in every one of her performances -- playing characters from a wide range of national, class, and historical backgrounds -- but also in her unique biography. Born and raised in a New Jersey middle-class family, a cheerleader, homecoming queen, and musical star in high school, an average student by her own description, Meryl Streep might have seemed an unlikely candidate for the kind of acclaim she has received since she started acting: not only the scholarship to Yale's Drama School; the critics' awards; or the one Tony and 10 {now 13} Academy Award nominations; the two Oscars, the Emmy and the Obie won, but also the reviews and articles which often open with something like, "Meryl Streep, the greatest American actress of her generation. . ."

The yoking in her biography of the ordinary family background (which she seems highly concerned of continuing with her own husband and children) and the extraordinary talent and training that has allowed her to take on any role with maturity, passion, and originality justifiably produces assessments reaching for ever new superlatives to define Streep's singularity. But, she is also a person of her time. Her meteoric rise in the late 1970s and 1980s, as well as her sustained prominence in the 1990s, has to be seen in the context of changes in women's roles and self-images spurred by the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps most painfully explored by baby-boom women, Streep's own generation. Articles about her often suggest that her self-transformation in high school --- changing her mousy brown hair to blonde, her glasses to contacts, throwing her shy self into cheerleading, swimming, singing, and acting -- was her first great "role," but her self-discoveries in college in the 1960s and 1970s seem to be equally influential on her subsequent career. She once told an interviewer that "it was great being with women" at Vassar.

It was at Vassar, and later at Yale, where Streep and the public would first discover her incredible acting talent. She played MISS JULIE at Vassar, stunning her drama teachers and audiences alike with her performance as the lead character, a notoriously difficult role even for experienced stage actresses. At Yale, just as later in the 1980s Hollywood, competition was fierce, nearly every important female role would be offered to her, critics would rave, and Streep would demonstrate enormous range, humor and generosity, winning the respect of directors, writers and co-stars. In the mid 1970s she enthusiastically embraced a life in the New York theatre world. Streep performed in a range of parts, from Shakespeare to Brecht, to Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller to great acclaim, picking up an Obie award and a Tony nomination.

But even such an experienced stage actress might need a mentor for her first film performance. She found Jane Fonda generously filling that role on the set of Fred Zinnemann's JULIA (1977), with Fonda coaching Streep on how to make her presence known in film. Back in Hollywood, Fonda raved about Streep to industry powers. Streep played supporting roles in her next two films, THE DEER HUNTER (1978) and KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979), finding a challenge in parts that were either under or over-written. Linda, the girl waiting at home for her man in the Vietnam war in The Deer Hunter, was inadequately characterized in the script. Streep found ways to "defend" her character, to enter her universe, a process that the actress finds not only exciting, but absolutely essential for performing the part. In this case, it meant finding empathetic understanding for the kinds of women Streep knew in high school who seemed to be just waiting for some guy, in other words, the women who didn't have the career and independence for which Streep fought for herself. Because her part was underwritten, Streep also had "great artistic freedom" to make it her performance, a daunting task when acting opposite Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken. Kramer vs. Kramer also presented a formidable challenge, how to make the part of Joanna Kramer, who leaves her husband and young son in the first 15 minutes of the film, sympathetic and realistic. Streep accomplished this in part through her performance, but also by arguing for script changes before shooting began. She felt that the book and the initial script threw so much sympathy towards the husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman), that the dramatic conflict was skewed and Joanna left unrealistic. Streep argued passionately for defining the character not as evil, but as so lacking in self-esteem that she had to leave.

At this point, Streep had made only three movies, but her integrity as an actress and the kinds of parts she was playing, already suggested what film critic Molly Haskell would argue in 1988 were defining qualities of the "Streep heroine": "women in flight from one self, one identity, and in search of another." She doesn't necessarily play feminist characters, but women who "uncannily embody various crosscurrents of experience in the last twenty years, as women have redefined themselves against the background of the women's movement." In the 1990s, Streep more explicitly expressed many contemporary women's dissatisfactions when she spoke out at a Screen Actor's Guild conference about gender discrimination atin the industry in terms of the quantity and quality of work for female performers and what they get paid compared to men. While she made these remarks as a working professional, as a mother, she also knows and hates that these industry realities mean that young women have PRETTY WOMAN as a role model. As an actress who longs to experience that "point where you just fly," the lack of quality, non-sexist roles is an immense disappointment. ". . . It's hard to negotiate the present landscape with a brain and a female body."

Streep refigures this statement a different way when she says that acting is an "act of compassionate understanding." For this reason she is not interested in acting in films that are polemical about gender or the environment, or about some other political context. What she liked about playing Karen Silkwood, the union activist at a nuclear power plant whose death in 1974 is considered mysterious by some, was that Karen was an unlikely heroine. She was kooky, cocky and difficult. She had troubled relationships with people, yet as the film SILKWOOD (1983) suggests so eloquently, she re-defined herself when she found something to stand up for. Streep played Silkwood immediately after her Oscar-winning role in SOPHIE'S CHOICE (1982), a character whose disastrous choice to give up one of her children, leaves her with nothing to stand up for or reinvent, only guilt. The director of Silkwood, Mike Nichols, said he couldn't believe it was Streep in both films, he thought his film was showing the real Streep.

For an actress who once said that actors are at their best "when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing" (while still knowing deep inside what they are doing), the real Streep is not necessarily relevant. But it is not hard to share Nichols' absolute awe of her talent, while most of her roles --as Suzanne Vale, the funniest and wisest of her characters knows in POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990), it is her uncommon burden, gift and desire to really "feel her life," even if this means being hyper-conscious of every aspect, even of her greatest humiliations. Hyperconsciousness is also the burden for Sarah Woodruff, Joanna Kramer, Sophie Zawistowska, Karen Silkwood, Susan Traherne in PLENTY (1985), Karen Blixen in OUT OF AFRICA (1985), Rachel in HEARTBURN (1986), Helen Archer in IRONWEED (1987), Lindy Chamberlain in A CRY IN THE DARK (1988) (perhaps Streep's least seen and most underrated performance), Francesca in THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (1995) and Lee in MARVIN'S ROOM (1996). These characters meet that burden or gift with a variety of responses -- self invention, suicide, political activism, emotional breakdown, telling stories, cooking and contempt, drink and memory, knowledge of the truth and love of God and family, surrender to love, anger, and finally sarcastic wit, a favorite coping mechanism for both Suzanne and Lee. Some also respond with music.

The one big role that Streep missed out on was playing Evita Peron. One can imagine how Streep might have made that character's hyperconsciousness visible, made her agency a question in a myth that seems to want to mystify her or make her a spectacle. One can also imagine that sweet, clear voice singing. We hear it express different longings and reserves of strength in Heartburn, Silkwood, Ironweed and Postcards From The Edge. In the latter, Suzanne/Streep belts out an energetic and joyful "I'm Checkin' Out" when she is finally sober and strong, but it is the song she wistfully sings early in the film, "You Don't Know Me," that lingers in memory. We don't really know this woman, but trying to has been one of the greatest experiences contemporary American film has offered us.

About the Event.

American actors are allowed to age slowly and gracefully, retaining their sex and box office appeal even into their 60s, but the career arc of the American actress is generally a more precipitous one. Although most actresses find their choice of roles severely limited once they pass 30, Meryl Streep may never yield to such Hollywood realities. It's been 20 years since she was nominated for her first Oscar (for The Deer Hunter); 25 films later, Streep is still the best and most important film actress in America. As Alan Pakula once said, "She's going to have a lot of primes. In her 80s, Meryl Streep will be giving great performances." Streep has become known as a chameleon, a shape-shifter... an appropriate icon for a postmodern, fractured, increasingly global age. Her gift for characterization, perhaps unrivaled in the American cinema, has been linked to her uncanny knack for accents, but Streep's talent for inhabiting characters resides in a more primal place. Joseph Papp once called Streep one of the few true actors he had met; her capacity to grasp and communicate complex psychological truths is remarkable.

In the '90s, Streep has proven increasingly versatile, excelling as a comedienne (in 1992's Defending Your Life, among others), a soccer mom/action hero (in The River Wild, 1994, in which she did her own stunts) and as a mature leading lady. Her performance in The Bridges of Madison County (1995) ranks among her best, and the new Dancing at Lughnasa serves to reaffirm Streep's talents. Graceful, impassioned and still as much a presence on screen as she was in the '70s, Streep already belongs in the company of Swanson, Garbo, Crawford and Bette Davis as one of America's finest actresses.A compilation of clips from Streep's films (Sophie's Choice, Silkwood, and Dancing at Lughnasa), were followed by the Medallion presentation and an on-stage interview.

Related Link:
Telluride Film Festival.com