Blockbuster.co.uk's Marshall Julius enjoys an audience with movie legend Meryl Streep, the star of powerful new drama, Doubt.
The greatest actress of her, or any other, generation,
Meryl Streep is so good at everything you'd think she'd be insufferable, but actually she's the nicest big-time movie star you could ever hope to meet, modest, down-to-earth, interested in and nurturing of others, honest, unguarded and still so excited about what she does for a living, her enthusiasm is infectious, to say the least. A two-time Academy Award winner and the recipient of a record-breaking fifteen Oscar nominations, Streep's latest offering is intense period drama
Doubt, based on the hit play by John Patrick Shanley, who wrote and directed this unforgettable adaptation.
Available from Friday at Blockbuster.co.uk,
Doubt stars Streep as Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the iron-gloved principal of a strict Catholic school in Sixties' New York. Disapproving of the modern ways promoted by charismatic priest Father Flynn (
Philip Seymour Hoffman), and galvanised by the half-baked suspicions of naïve Sister James (
Amy Adams), Sister Aloysius initiates an escalating witch hunt for Flynn, accusing him of all manner of inappropriate acts with the school's first black student, Donald. Without a shred of proof or evidence except her moral certainty, Sister Aloysius locks into a battle of wills with Father Flynn, a battle that threatens to tear apart both the church and the school.
"I'd seen the play years before," says Streep of how she came to the project. "My friend, Cherry Jones, had given what I thought was the definitive portrayal of Sister Aloysius. It was a great, great play, but I never thought it would be made into a movie until John invited me to lunch to talk about it. Honestly though, my first thought was for Cherry, and I asked why she wasn't doing it.
"John explained that for various reasons, including financial considerations, he had not directed the stage production and that he wanted his own hands on the film adaptation. He wanted to make something new. That seemed valid to me, and besides, I sure wanted a crack at that Sister Aloysius. I also think that like all good pieces of literature, Doubt holds a lot of different interpretations. You'll see this play over and over again and there'll be lots of different interpretations. But I'm really proud of this one and what we did."
Of her research process, Streep reveals, "I did some wonderful interviews with the Sisters of Charity, a group of retired nuns, one of whom was John's first grade teacher. She was a model for Sister James in a way. She's 71 now and she was not only a font of information, but an inspiration. She's similarly liberated. Visiting the retirement home, I had a couple of meals with them and it was really great. They were mostly in their seventies, eighties and nineties. I don't know how many retirement homes you've visited, but they're not usually happy places. But these retirement homes were filled with people who were happy. They were with their family. They were all productively engaged in some kind of work. No one was truly retired. They were still tutoring kids, they were visiting the bereaved... it was a great inspiration."
On the verge of turning 60, Streep insists she was untroubled by wearing so little make up for the role. "Seriously," she emphasises, "it's really a very freeing thing. You throw away everything that women normally waste a great number of hours of the day on. You don't worry about how your hair looks, how your face is or what the state of the disarray is. Everything is gone and all you have is what you do. It's probably the way we should be, and it was very, very liberating and sort of spiritual, if I dare use the word."
As every year that passes sees Streep adding to her incredible body of work, you can imagine younger actors being at least initially wary of the actress, but she'll have none of that. "I'm intimidated by me," she says. "I'm intimidated by the thing that they say is me. But it goes away in the process of working. Actors really do want to clear away everything that is extraneous, so we get to it quickly enough."
Though today she's the inspiration for generations of rising actresses, when she was young herself, Streep reveals her biggest influences were her teachers. "I had a number of great teachers and the ones who were the strongest influences on me were women - really smart and interesting women. "That's because I was educated at a time when you could be, as a smart, educated and ambitious woman, a nurse, a teacher, you could run a hairdressing salon or aim for a job in journalism, but you'd only get so high. If you were extremely entrepreneurial, you could start your own boutique business. But you couldn't rise in publishing, you couldn't rise in business, in law, and you couldn't be a doctor. It's not like now. Today, half of the law and medical students in America are women. But when I was a kid, you could only aspire so high, and as a result of the limitations on their horizon, I had some great, great teachers. Otherwise they would have all been lawyers or running their own corporations. "I had, to give you one example, a music teacher in high school who had just been a student of Pablo Casals. She came to our high school because she was broke and because Casals had told her, 'You're a wonderful player, but women don't rise in a great orchestra.' So she turned to teaching, and I was lucky enough to have her."
Speaking of great women, Streep has played an extraordinary number of amazing women over the years. But are there any she'd like to revisit? And which, if any, come close to her own personality? "I have never really imagined revisiting any of them," she says frankly, "though there's word of a sequel to
Mamma Mia! So, you might be inflicted with that one again! As for which one's like me... I think I'm all of them. I'm right there if anybody cares to look. You can find me in everything I play."