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The devil in Meryl
The Devil Wears Prada is a film about status. And here we are in Venice at a time of year the film festival when the Hollywood feudal system lays itself bare. Those in attendance wear passes and wristbands and all the other formal indicators of caste, but as a general rule of thumb, on this late summer morning, you can tell how important a person is by how much they are sweating.
Down a long hotel corridor, the entourage comes: first the damp-fringed PR serfs, then security men baked in black suits; a phalanx of gently perspiring personal assistants forms the inner circle and, in the middle, like an atom borne along by the activity around it, is Meryl Streep, in cornflower blue. Ms Streep is not sweating. She is smiling, as the highly visible are obliged to do, and which she will later inform me — “My God!” — takes some energy “to be nice all the time”. As she enters the publicity suite, an attendant points out in a low (but not quite low enough) voice that the toilet at Ms Streep’s disposal is distinct from the one that will be used by those who are not Meryl Streep.
She is one of the most famous actresses in the world, but it is strangely hard to pin an image on Streep. Over the course of her career, she has laboured to establish herself as an actor whose roots lie in ordinary life. She admits to not washing her hair very often (her record is three weeks); she drives a modest, ecologically sound Toyota Prius; she lived until recently in Connecticut with her husband Don Gummer, a sculptor, and their four children — they are back in New York now — and when she speaks, she generally has something to say.
Paradoxically, this contrives to make her seem even more regal. At 57, Streep is beautiful in an unfussy way; she gesticulates and clutches handfuls of hair and moans theatrically that Venice is a chore, although she hears that “Jeremy may be in town next week”. Oh yes, Jeremy Irons, her co-star in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. She smiles beneficently. She is still an actor, after all.
For her 33rd movie Streep has chosen to play a modish role, that of Miranda Priestly, the villain of Lauren Weisberger’s hit novel of 2003, now adapted for screen and co-starring Anne Hathaway. Weisberger wrote the book after spending a year as assistant to Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, whom she lightly fictionalised as a woman of such joyless vacuity that she could depressurise a room just by entering it.
It is an interesting role for Streep, who has herself from time to time been labelled an “ice queen” and who one imagines hesitated to accept a part so nakedly based on a living person. Ethically, Weisberger was thought to have done something rather dubious with this book, which was singled out by literary New York for an unusually severe kicking. Streep loftily removes herself from all this. There was no awkwardness, she says, when she met Wintour for the first time at the film’s gala premiere in New York.
Her intention, she says, was to depict neither Wintour nor Weisberger’s idea of her but to come up with her own characterisation, thank you very much, and the Priestly of the film has been duly Streepified: beefed into the third dimension with a sense of humour, an appreciation for the macro-economics of fashion and, in one memorable scene near the end, a dash of devastated vulnerability.
It’s fascinating to watch Streep train her heavy artillery on such slight material; stripped of make-up and looking like a mollusc prised from its shell, she plays the breakdown scene so hard that her eyes seem to turn from blue to black. (Trying to bump up sympathy for the old dragon, I suggest. But Streep snaps, “I didn’t give a damn about sympathetic. I cared about true.”)
Streep is one of the few actresses who, blow for blow, can match the heaviest of the male heavyweights without recourse to sex appeal; when you see her playing opposite Eastwood, De Niro, Redford or Hoffman, it’s like watching a live-action version of that game, shark v bear. Hoffman admitted to wanting to throttle her during the making of ‘Kramer vs Kramer’ and cattily said that 99 per cent of what she did wasn’t acting
She calls The Devil Wears Prada a “serious/frivolous movie”, that is “a lark, fun to watch, but its architecture — its bones — are sharp”. Given that the last book Streep enjoyed was by Orhan Pamuk, you wonder if she isn’t snobbish about the film’s chick-lit origins, just as you wondered, in 1996, if she was sniffy about appearing in the adaptation of Robert James Waller’s much mocked tear-jerker The Bridges of Madison County (which, thanks to Streep and Clint Eastwood, was actually very good). She says: “It’s always very telling what’s popular. There’s a reason that Bridges was popular and there’s a hidden power in Prada. I wanted to locate what that was.”
This was partly its revenge-on-the-boss fantasy and partly “something deep about powerful women and how terrifying they are. And how much of a problem we have with that.” It doesn't quite fly, this attempt to pass off Prada as a defence of powerful women, since Streep’s character deserves everything she gets. One may be discriminated against, I suggest, and still vile in one’s own right.
“Yes. Exactly. Yes! Yes. But ... in my own experience of male and female directors, people have a much, much harder time taking a direct command from a woman. It’s somehow very difficult for people. You can’t excuse Miranda’s behaviour, but there is a certain directness that is necessary as the boss.
“The truth is that this is an incredibly high-pressured position; the buck stops with her. If somebody has to get her a cappuccino because she can’t run down and stand in line in Starbucks, then suck it up and go get it for her. If she works till 2am to go through the magazine, somebody has to deliver the dry-cleaning. Boo hoo, what a horrible job.” Pause. “I felt, if not sympathy, then understanding of that.”
Mind you, she says, she wouldn’t like to be her. “I could not live that way. I could never, ever do that. Who wants it? Who wants to be president?” At her best, Streep makes films suitable only for adults, which outside of the porn industry is quite rare these days. Her most famous scene is probably from Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982), in which an SS guard at Auschwitz makes Streep’s character choose which of her two children to hand over for execution. It’s classic Streep, the kind of scene that makes your scalp tighten, but defter in a way is her handling of smaller, harder-to-grasp emotions. She does embarrassment very well. In that same film, Sophie is humiliated by the librarian at a New York public library for mispronouncing Emily Dickinson. Streep manages to inject just the right level of mortified colour into her cheeks before collapsing in a dead faint. Her approach has been called too academic but really, she says, she can be quite lazy.
She grew up in New Jersey, her mother a commercial artist, her father head of a personnel department at Merck & Co, the pharmaceutical company. As a girl, Streep read the New Yorker. “I never read big novels until I was a grown-up.” She says: “You wanna know what my mother was like? Look at Ladies In Lavender. I almost couldn’t watch it, because Judi Dench looked exactly like my mother.”
She studied drama, first at Vassar, then at Yale, where she worried herself into the beginnings of an ulcer. Streep is a big worrier. After graduating, she worked in the theatre, then in 1978 won a small role in The Deer Hunter, which she did enough with to get her first Oscar nomination. Streep was 29 when she was cast in the role of Joanna, the unhappy wife in Robert Benton’s anatomy of a divorce, Kramer Vs Kramer. She doesn’t play it screamy when she abandons Hoffman and their son in the opening scene, but just overtightens the belt of her coat until the tension is unbearable.Streep is one of the few actresses who, blow for blow, can match the heaviest of the male heavyweights without recourse to sex appeal; when you see her playing opposite Eastwood, De Niro, Redford or Hoffman, it’s like watching a live-action version of that game, shark v bear. Hoffman admitted to wanting to throttle her during the making of Kramer and cattily said that 99 per cent of what she did wasn’t acting. Does she know what he meant by that?
“I know what he thinks was true.” She pulls a face. “Because he’s — I don't know. I’m presuming to get into his brain, which is a ... complicated place. I felt that he was talking about my emotional state and that I was very emotional, so he felt that I couldn’t help but give this performance.”
Of all the accents Streep has done, she found the Australian one for A Cry In The Dark, the Lindy Chamberlain biopic, the hardest. She nearly lost out on the role because the director, Sydney Pollack, thought she wasn’t sexy enough (“For that well-known sexpot Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen],” she says drily).
The longest she has gone without an Oscar nomination is five years, between Postcards from the Edge (1991) and The Bridges of Madison County (1996). She begged William Styron, who wrote the novel Sophie’s Choice, to write another part like that for her, but none was forthcoming and in the late 1980s and early 1990s she made what are considered to be her worst films, comedies such as Death Becomes Her and She-Devil. Things have turned around again since then. She shrugs and says, “I’ve always been able to find something, when I’ve wanted to work, that I’ve thought I could apply myself to, that interested me or tickled me in some way.” Dawn / The Guardian news service
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