We agree: Meryl Streep is a radiant and expressive actress. She is immense on the screen and, also, for those who have been lucky enough to see her, the greatest on stage. She is perfect. Her name is hers and she will forever be listed alongside Laurence Olivier, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and, of course, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, to name her equals.
She is a woman of her time. She is a staunch enemy of Trump and the United States that the former president represents, and committed to the. cause of women: tired like all actresses that, after a certain age, you only have the roles of a witch left, if anything. She has won all the awards, such as the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts that she has just won, and all are few for her…
Meryl Streep is a perfect actress, yes. The question now, at this point in her award-winning career, is precisely that: is she too perfect?
And it is that perfection tires, and excess in flattery can arouse animosity. That’s how we are, you see. Until we ask ourselves: Does Meryl Streep make each of her interpretations an engineering exercise? Is she calculating she? Is she cold? The legendary Katharine Hepburn, for example, said of her that she was too cerebral, given to her prodigious acting technique. “When you see it on the screen, you feel the gears working, tick, tick, tick,” Hepburn added.
Once you define yourself, you admire the perfection in Meryl Streep, but above all you love her most human and versatile part, capable of giving many of her characters -countless at this point in her career- a sense of improvisation and truth.
He prefers her, so to speak, when she is less controlled – or less seems to be – and the more unruly she is. The injured mother in Kramer v. Kramer, for example; the enamored baroness in Far from Africa; the mother – again motherhood – with an impossible decision in Sofie’s decision, and the woman in love and responsible, perhaps wrong, in “The Bridges of Madison”. But above all, because of how happy she was seen on the screen and how happy she made others pass it off, he admires her for that brave, outlandish and full of life character that she embodied in Mamma MÃa, to name those who come to the mind to boat soon…
“Meryl earns an Oscar nomination every time she sneezes,” Sigourney Weaver said of her, and it’s true. Robert de Niro, since they worked together on The Hunter (1977), has repeatedly declared her respect and veneration for her. And the letter that Bette Davis wrote to Streep in the early eighties, in which she somehow named her as the only one capable of being her worthy successor, is famous.
Perhaps the best compliment one has ever heard of her is the one she was given at the time by Sharon Stone: “Meryl (Streep) is like a bed to be made: something real and close.” It is a perfect definition: Streep is close, when she wants and, furthermore, she knows how to make her imperfections a fertile field where she can imagine her greatness, her characters: make her weaknesses the center of humanity. her. Thank you, Mrs. Streep, for showing us how weak and, at the same time, how strong we can be. And congratulations on the award, one more in her career. Although apparently she doesn’t care much for them, none. Legend has it that once she left an Oscar, one of many, in the ladies’ room.
And thanks, too, for some advice that he has been able to give to his professional colleagues: “Don’t worry about your weight; don’t suffer for being too old, and don’t get angry if someone finds you attractive enough for a role. The only thing you have to worry about, as an actress, is not to lose. Losing your heart is the most dangerous thing that can happen to you.”
