Hollywood Bulletin
Manila Bulletin.comBy JANET SUSAN NEPALES
December 12, 2011, 11:33am
The author gives Meryl Streep a ‘Streep Tease’ fan. ‘Streep Tease: An Evening of Meryl Streep Monologues,’ created by Fil-Am actor Roy Cruz, is an all-male show that highlights all of Meryl’s most memorable roles. (Photo by Ruben V. Nepales)
NEW YORK – Leave it to the legendary Meryl Streep to give us one of our most memorable interviews for the year.
The multi-awarded 62-year-old actress, who arrived in a red sweater, broke into a smile when she saw us wearing a red sweater too! “Oh look at us! It is Christmas time!” she chirpily greeted us when we talked to her one chilly day in New York for her most anticipated movie, “The Iron Lady.”
“Mamma Mia!” director Phyllida Lloyd directs a biographical film on the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “The Iron Lady.” Meryl explained to us the gist of the movie. “The film tackles the three days at the end of an old woman’s life and we are looking back at things and memories through her eyes,” she said. “So when a siren blares in the street, it reminds her of a specific time. The reason that these memories are coming up is that there is a disruption that is happening in her very quiet day-to-day life. That is, for whatever reason, she has decided to let go of the past and of the memory of her husband. That is the emotional trigger for so much of this.
“When she gets a phone call from her son saying he can’t make it to see her again, this brings up the loss of young lives in the Falklands so it is a personal trip. It is not a trip through history hitting all the points. No. We do not get into the Westlands controversy and the Sikorsky Helicopters that she wanted to buy from America. We do not concern ourselves with every single step in the chronological telling of Margaret Thatcher’s life. We are interested in the moments in the life of an old woman, of the least important person in society in many cultures, the most erasable.
“We thought wouldn’t it be interesting to look back at her life if it had been this turbulent life. I wanted to make a movie about mortality and letting go of life. I have just lost both of my parents and that is what I was interested in. We found a story that we felt could tell that tale. You have to make a documentary to do the political story and we were not interested in doing that. This is a completely subjective look at Margaret Thatcher’s end of her life, the ebb, the diminishment of her power.”
So in what areas of her life can she be an Iron Lady, we asked. “Can I be an iron lady? I am an ironing lady. That is what I do. I do this,” she wittily replied and then started pretending to iron.
Turning serious, she said, “I guess I am passionate about my work, about being understood and what the work is. I do not like to be misconstrued in what I am trying to do and I share that with the Iron Lady. She took a stance and stood by it. What drew me to playing this character is in every character that I have played. I feel defensive about them and I defend them as if they are my own life. Because for the time that I embody them, they feel like they are me so I am not very objective.”
At home, though, Meryl admitted to being very strict. “Can I be strict at home? You betcha. In every marriage, there is a good cop and a bad cop. Guess which one I am? That is often the way. Daddy is the good cop. They always go to him and there are initials in my house. I did not know what it meant for so long – DTM. That is ‘Don’t Tell Mom.’ I just found that out.”
Meryl revealed that the most difficult part of her role was physical. “I would say that 40 percent of the portrayal is an old woman. So in the film, that meant I would be like this (she walked hunchback) for 12 hours and it was very painful after a time. I thought of Daniel Day Lewis when he did ‘My Left Foot’ and I thought of that same contortion. All I wanted was a great masseur. If anybody knows a great masseur in England, let me know because they are few and far between.”
How does she feel as a celebrated American actress playing a British Prime Minister, we asked. Meryl admitted, “I felt nervous about that myself but my director Phyllida was so smart because when she brought me this story, she said, ‘The reason you are perfect to play this is because you are an outsider and Margaret Thatcher was an outsider in her world, in her party. She was always where she did not belong or where she was not wanted.’ So I did not feel unwanted but I did feel nervous the very first day we walked into the rehearsal hall. There were 45 of the most wonderful British actors and they had all done their homework.”
As for what she discovered about playing Margaret Thatcher, Meryl revealed, “I discovered that she had no cook. She was head of the United Kingdom for 11 ½ years and she did not have a cook. I have a cook. And she wanted to make dinner for her husband Denis every night. She forgot to eat a lot. Something I have never done. She would work late at night and she had prodigious amounts of energy. She would require all the cabinet ministers to be up there in the apartment with her. And Denis, her husband, would come and say, ‘Woman, you’ve got to feed these men.’ She would whip up some horrible rarebit or something and give it to them. This is what surprised me. Downing Street has 60 or 70 employees while the White House has 400 employees.”
So was Margaret Thatcher lonely, we inquired. “I think every leader is,” Meryl replied. “There are many men who come into power and they bring their whole cohort. They bring a whole fraternity of friends, business associates, and deep ties way back.”
Does she feel alone too sometimes, we asked. “I am married and I have thousands of children,” she teasingly said. “I don’t feel alone. I would LOVE to be alone for five minutes. It would be great.”
Formerly a Manila journalist, Los Angeles-based Janet Susan R. Nepales is a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
E-mail the writer at jrnepales_624@yahoo.com for your comments and questions
http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/344526/meryl-streep-i-am-the-ironing-lady
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