The board of education and the district attorney think that music isn’t important. But they are wrong! And they’re gonna get a big fight!—Roberta Guaspari
(Music of the Heart, 1999)
When Wes Craven, master of the horror genre, suddenly found himself in a filmmaker’s nightmare, he didn’t panic. Instead, he activated what qualified as a Bat-Signal to reach Meryl Streep: an impassioned letter.
Craven had cast Madonna in Music of the Heart, his uncharacteristically earnest drama inspired by the true story of violin teacher Roberta Guaspari, who cofounded the Opus 118 Harlem School of Music and fought for music education funding in New York City. But Madonna turned out to be the wrong fit, so Craven pivoted to Meryl as a replacement. It was the summer of 1998, and Meryl had decided she would not make another movie until after Christmas—nor did she think there was enough time to learn the violin before filming started. Craven’s note changed her mind. “This can’t fall apart,” she recalled him pleading. “I’ve waited 20 years to make an out-of-genre film. This is my chance and it’s something I really care about.” Meryl couldn’t say no. “I’m a pushover,” she explained.
Madonna took voice lessons to expand her range before starring in the 1996 movie musical Evita, a role Meryl had yearned to do since the beginning of time. (“I could rip her throat out,” Meryl joked of Madge. And, in 1990, amid reports that the pop star was in talks to join Evita following Meryl’s departure, Los Angeles Magazine published a gossipy item relaying that Meryl thought Madonna lacked the vocal range for the role.) For Music of the Heart, the Blonde Ambition icon recruited Roberta for private violin lessons at her New York home and also attended a beginner’s violin class incognito. Roberta grew to like Madonna. “She was a real workaholic,” she recalls. “She was really vulnerable then.” The problem: Madonna wanted Pamela Gray’s script rewritten to gloss over the reality that two men deserted Roberta: first her husband and then a commitment-phobic love interest played by Aidan Quinn. “Madonna didn’t like that,” says Roberta. In the end, Craven cut her loose. While Roberta was en route to give her a lesson, Madonna, sobbing, phoned to say she’d been let go. “He fired her because she got too involved trying to run it,” Roberta says.
The Miramax production shut down. Feelers were put out to Susan Sarandon and Marisa Tomei. But, they were back in business with Meryl on board. She picked up the violin and went to work.
Three years earlier, in February 1995, Meryl began a streak of somber dramas that lacked the stirring passion of The Bridges of Madison County. It started with the bleak, Massachusetts-set prestige drama Before and After, the kind of movie you watched only once and never returned to again. The director, Barbet Schroeder, had carved a niche helming slick thrillers such as Single White Female and Kiss of Death; his moody style suited Before and After, which screenwriter Ted Tally adapted from Rosellen Brown’s 1992 crime novel of the same name. Meryl played pediatrician Dr. Carolyn Ryan, and Liam Neeson her artist-husband Ben, a role that Robert De Niro had considered three years earlier. The Ryans’ blissful existence is turned upside down when their teenage son, Jacob (Edward Furlong), runs away on suspicion that he killed his girlfriend, Martha (Alison Folland). Eventually, Jacob reveals the truth to his parents. According to Jacob, Martha had blindsided Jacob with a bombshell betrayal: she was pregnant, and Jacob might not be the father. He’s stung by the news, yet they sleep together in Jacob’s car, which gets snowed in. An argument ensues outside while they try to jack up the vehicle. Jacob slaps Martha and she retaliates by attacking him with a crowbar. He grabs hold of the crowbar and strikes Martha in the head. She falls face-first on the jack.
Ben advises Jacob to lie to authorities, but, during a press conference, Carolyn enrages Ben by subverting their story to tell the real version of events. She won’t apologize for doing the right thing, yet her red-rimmed eyes hint at remorse for betraying her kid. Then, Jacob—finding his moral compass—finally confesses to police. He gets sentenced to five years for manslaughter, serving only two; Ben, convicted of destroying evidence, spends less than one year in the slammer. Afterward, the Ryans move to Miami; there’s a sense of unease as they canoe down a waterway in the last scene. Though the pro-Jacob narrative attempts to justify Martha’s death by smearing her as promiscuous and violent, a young girl is gone because of his actions.
“It interested me because it was like the Hinckley case, this boy who shot President Reagan to get attention and was, from all accounts, from a very happy family. And it destroyed them,” Meryl said. “Reality can turn on a dime, and your life is changed forever.”
A month into the Before and After shoot, Meryl was in talks to star opposite Diane Keaton and Leonardo DiCaprio in Marvin’s Room, with Jerry Zaks attached to direct and De Niro to produce. The tearjerker was based on Scott McPherson’s play about a troubled woman who reconnects with her estranged, terminally ill sister. Both Meryl and Diane reportedly took pay cuts. Despite its distinguished cast, Marvin’s Room, a Miramax release, was being made with a relatively small budget ($23 million) for an A-list studio picture. Bob and Harvey Weinstein founded Miramax in 1979 and, by the mid-1990s, established the company as the most powerful incubator of independent cinema in Hollywood. Disney acquired Miramax for $60 million in 1993, yet the Weinsteins continued to call the shots at their studio. Their successes included Sex, Lies and Videotape, The Crying Game, and Pulp Fiction, which transformed writer-director Quentin Tarantino into a household name and indie film into a mainstream event.
Meryl seemed out of place. Though Pulp Fiction put John Travolta back on the map in 1994, the clever—and extremely bloody—picture repelled her. “I thought it was very well made,” she conceded. “Smart. Very smart. And I hated it in my soul.… And my friends: ‘Oh, I loved that!’ You can’t apply words like love to that movie. Because it doesn’t fit.”
Like her friend Nora Ephron, director of the sincere ’90s romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle, Meryl thought having “edge” was overrated. “All it means to me is depressing,” she said, worrying, “It all leaves an imprint on kids who are way too young to be looking at the crap—the stuff—that’s out there.… Do I want them to page through Vogue and see the Nan Goldin models and the heroin look? Or the Calvin Klein downtown porn thing? Is that cool? That’s not cool to me, I don’t like it.”
Writing about Meryl in the LA Times, Matthew Gilbert said that, in person, she resembled “an out-and-out soccer mom, minivan with kids waiting outside, an undone load of laundry with her name on it at home.” Meryl owned the soccer mom label, telling People magazine, “I am, but I don’t understand it. They all run up, they all run down. I don’t know who is playing what.” Like any involved parent, she had strong feelings about PTA meetings: “I hate the PTA. I tend to get too emotional. I’m a wild card, and my friends go, ‘Shhh, shhh.’”
Meryl and Tarantino would never work together (imagine that!). She gravitated toward directors who gave her the space to communicate human feelings; she met a solid match in Clint Eastwood, whose later films had a lot of heart and soul (none of which he brought to his baffling empty chair speech at the Republican National Convention in 2012). On June 2, 1995, The Bridges of Madison County ranked number two at the box office, behind the family film Casper, and went on to make $182 million worldwide. Meryl, a rare People cover subject, graced the June 26 issue alongside the headline: “MERYL’S PASSION.” Reviews were glowing. New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote, “The movie has leanness and surprising decency, and Meryl Streep has her best role in years.” Meryl, noted Maslin, “rises straight out of ‘Christina’s World’ to embody all the loneliness and fierce yearning Andrew Wyeth captured on canvas.” Time’s Richard Corliss called Bridges “Eastwood’s gift to women: to Francesca, to all the girls he’s loved before—and to Streep, who alchemizes literary mawkishness into intelligent movie passion.”
One Manhattan movie theater strategically placed a box of tissues for moviegoers walking out of Bridges. Meryl, meanwhile, embarked on another emotional film, Marvin’s Room, which was shot in New York City. She helicoptered in from Connecticut on the regular. “I got very pissy at the end of the day,” she said, “if people weren’t hustling their butts to finish their work so I could get in the helicopter.”
Meryl’s character, Lee, is very different from Francesca; her voice is a rich, low alto tinged with cigarette smoke and bitterness. The single mom, a beautician, has buried her emotions to the point where she’s incapable of connecting with her two sons, the oldest of whom literally burns down their home to get her attention. When Lee retrieves Hank (a feral, intense DiCaprio) from a mental institution, she barely registers his apology. Earlier she tells a shrink, “Hank is not something I can control, so what’s the point of me visiting?”
Turns out that Lee is paralyzed by a past trauma: her abusive ex used to beat Hank when he was a small child. The native Floridian moved Hank and brother Charlie (Hal Scardino) to Ohio, cutting off communication with her sister, Bessie (Diane Keaton), and father, Marvin (the ornery Hume Cronyn), who’s bedridden from a stroke two decades earlier. Suddenly, Bessie, his caretaker, receives disappointing news via her socially awkward doctor (a deadpan De Niro) that she has leukemia and requires a bone marrow transplant. She phones Lee, who packs up the kids and drives to the Sunshine State. Hank, unaware that he even had an aunt, suspects Bessie is pretending to care about him in case he’s a match. While Hank learns to trust adults again, Bessie—patient and compassionate—teaches Lee the value of family and how to listen and let other people in. (Truth: this movie is more earnest than a Sarah McLachlan album—or my teenage self.)
Meryl originally signed on to play Bessie, the dependable sibling, but the role hit too close to home so she switched to Lee. She read Frank J. Sulloway’s book on birth order, Born to Rebel, and said having two younger brothers influenced her personality. “Being the oldest, and being the only girl, has defined a lot for me,” she revealed. “I see it in my son, who is the oldest and has three little sisters. They’re allowed to be wild, and he’s very responsible.”
Meryl agreed to participate in Marvin’s Room on the condition that Diane be cast in the showiest role. She “wanted somebody I could feel like sisters with, because I never had a sister. So I picked my sister,” she said. Diane developed a girl crush on Meryl. “I find her beautiful,” she gushed, “and I’m constantly looking at her.” When it came time to shoot a scene in which Bessie reveals to Lee that her boys aren’t bone marrow matches, Diane insisted upon breaking down in sobs. But director Jerry Zaks pushed back, advising her to go the opposite direction. Wouldn’t Bessie, who always put others first, try to hold it together for Lee’s sake? Reassure her that everything’s gonna be fine? “Diane was reluctant to embrace that, which is frustrating, because I’m very spoiled,” Zaks says. “I’m used to actors really trusting what I have to say.”
Meryl, knowing Zaks was right, helped persuade Diane to let go of her initial idea. “I think he’s got a point,” she said. As a result, Diane’s affecting performance reflected how Bessie would actually respond to news that her disease will likely kill her. Rather than collapse on the floor, she comforts her weaker sibling.
“Meryl’s emotionality is always appropriate,” Zaks observes. “And the reason I tell you that is because without Meryl, whom Diane adores, saying what she did, I wasn’t able to get the scene the way I wanted. And if you look at that scene now… Diane, she’s magnificent. Because she’s smiling and yet there are tears in her eyes. She is pulling off the physically impossible act of doing two things at the same time.”
When the 1997 Oscar nominations were announced, it was Diane, not Meryl, who received a Best Actress nod. The year earlier, Meryl had been nominated in the category for The Bridges of Madison County, conceding defeat to Susan Sarandon of Dead Man Walking. And speaking of Susans: perpetual nominee Meryl, who hadn’t won since Sophie’s Choice, was turning into the Susan Lucci of film. Perhaps voters shrugged and said, “Well, she’s already got two.”
In 1997, Meryl lined up roles in two more dramas: Pat O’Connor’s low-budget screen version of the Irish play Dancing at Lughnasa, playing the eldest (and fussiest) of five unmarried sisters, and One True Thing, Universal Studios’ mother-daughter weepie costarring Meryl as a suburban mom dying of cancer and Renée Zellweger as the daughter who’s come home to take care of her.
For the former, Meryl took her family on location to Ireland. Dancing at Lughnasa filmed in County Wicklow, just south of Dublin, during the month of August. She worried about her accent and dancing skills. An Irish dance teacher near her Connecticut home taught Meryl some steps; she learned the Irish lilt with an assist from Guinness. “I think I made it more difficult than it was and when I relaxed with a pint or two it was fine,” she confessed. By far the biggest name on the call sheet, Meryl loved being part of an ensemble filled with British and Irish actors—an experience that fondly recalled her theater days. She hadn’t been on stage since Taken in Marriage at the Public Theater in 1979, when Henry was eighteen months old. “I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to have to give this a rest for a while,’” she said. “And then I never imagined I’d have so many children. Oh yes, everything is so finely calculated!”
Movies checked off more pluses than minuses: they paid more than plays, and she could be with her kids on nights and weekends. She now worked summers or on New York–adjacent fare like One True Thing, which kicked off in New Jersey in October 1997. Meryl drove herself back and forth to Connecticut every day. “I understand she drives like a race-car driver,” says One True Thing director Carl Franklin, whose filmography includes the Denzel Washington noir Devil in a Blue Dress. Earlier that year, Franklin had flown out to Ireland to meet Meryl, and the two hung out, drinking Guinness at the pub restaurant. “It was disarming to see her so accessible,” he says.
Though Meryl missed the table read and rehearsals due to Lughnasa, she arrived on set prepared to shoot her scenes in chronological order so she could authentically chart her character’s cancer progression. Meryl had a diet plan to lose weight and even changed her voice and speech pattern as the illness took a toll on Kate Gulden, the latest mother in her repertoire and perhaps the most saintlike. The story, based on Anna Quindlen’s 1994 novel, orbits around the relationship between Kate, the unsung glue that holds the family together, and her daughter Ellen, an ambitious journalist. Ellen idealizes her aloof, self-absorbed professor father, George (William Hurt), and resents the sunny, cheerful Kate for leading a domestic life. After Kate’s diagnosis, Ellen begins to appreciate her mom and the unconditional love she gave. The two grow very close, and an outing to a town tree-lighting ceremony—when Kate is gravely sick but so happy to be there—tugs at the heartstrings.
“My generation’s mothers were the last housewives. And this captures that,” Meryl said. “The conflict between the career woman and her mother who bakes. I did relate to it. My mother always worked out of her house. She was a commercial artist, but not really a career woman. Mostly she just took care of me and my two brothers. Still, she was a great role model in many ways.”
Though One True Thing received positive reviews, Franklin was dismayed by one critic’s accusation that the movie, in putting Kate on a pedestal, pushed an insidious message to young women: get back in the kitchen. “None of us felt that way, especially not Meryl,” Franklin states, emphasizing that Ellen “was going back to work with a greater understanding of that kind of woman.”
Meryl balked when Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour outperformed One True Thing, $31 million to $6.6 million, during the movies’ opening weekend. Marvin’s Room completely tanked, collecting just $13 million. Meryl was choosy about which movies she took on—and she publicly stood by her choices, flop or not. But, clearly, commercial success wasn’t her sole mission, given the cozy character dramas she favored at the time. “A lot of scripts get sent which my agents no longer even pass on to me,” she said. “They’re so used to me saying, ‘Why do you send me this shit? You know I’m going to give it to the kids to do their crayoning on.’”
Meryl stamped her coveted seal of approval on the Madonna-less Music of the Heart. Roberta Guaspari, a big personality with an indomitable spirit, provided plenty of quirks to emulate. According to Roberta’s sons, she lacks a filter, spouting whatever comes to mind; that’s part of her charm. Although boasting two degrees in music education, she put her career on hold to raise a family and follow her navy-officer husband from post to post. When he asked for a divorce, she jumped back into the workforce. Roberta, armed with nothing but her strong will, talked her way into a gig as a substitute violin teacher at East Harlem’s Central Park East School. There, she gained a reputation for inspiring underprivileged and promising young talents, and her success rate allowed her to expand the string program to two additional urban schools. However, ten years later, in 1991, the city eliminated the funds necessary to keep Roberta’s efforts going. She lost her job. Down but not out—she’d hit rock bottom before—Roberta gathered the troops and staged a benefit concert featuring her ex-pupils at Carnegie Hall. Joining them: none other than violin virtuosos Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern. During the making of Music of the Heart, New York poured money into Opus 118, which exists to this day.
Meryl learned the violin from mid-July 1998 through that August, six hours a day for exactly six weeks. Once shooting began, she tried to practice around the schedule, but time was very scarce. Roberta says she gave Meryl one lesson in early September, and Meryl observed a couple of classes, watching her subject in action. The actress-technician sharpened her newfound skills with a violinist from the New York Philharmonic all the way through January, when she was to recreate the climactic Carnegie performance. Character-wise, Meryl nailed Roberta’s feisty temperament and New York accent. Roberta assumed she’d seen Small Wonders, the Oscar-nominated 1995 documentary on which Music of the Heart was based. “She knew how to talk like me, walk like me, she got it down to a science,” she says. Her students and their parents noticed, too.
“Playing a real person carries with it a whole other set of responsibilities than you would have when creating a fictional character,” Meryl said. “So I did as much research as I could and then I just sort of threw it away, because the real woman is a sizeable phenomenon of energy, inspiration, hard work and irascibility. I tried to capture little parts of her and put it together in the film. But Roberta was around and kind of drove me crazy a bit on the set. I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable that I wasn’t doing it right. But it wasn’t a piece of mimicry.”
Finally, the moment of truth: not only did Meryl hold her own alongside Stern and Perlman, playing themselves, but she succeeded in impressing the greats with her talent. Everyone was blown away. Meryl would recall being so nervous that Roy Helland held a hair dryer under her armpit.
After Music of the Heart premiered in September 1999, Meryl did not release a movie for another three years—well, if you discount her cameo voicing the Blue Fairy in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 sci-fi drama, A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
Music performed below expectations, grossing $3.7 million its opening weekend and, eventually, $15 million over two months in theaters. Of all her movies, only Kramer vs. Kramer surpassed the $100 million mark domestically. Meryl, however, earned wide praise for her salty Roberta Guaspari. “Here you might think she has no accent, unless you’ve heard her real speaking voice; then you realize that Guaspari’s speaking style is no less a particular achievement than Streep’s other accents,” Ebert wrote. “This is not Streep’s voice, but someone else’s—with a certain flat quality, as if later education and refinement came after a somewhat unsophisticated childhood.”
At fifty years old, Meryl was losing momentum. She had aged gracefully but away from the movies that seemed to capture the zeitgeist. That all changed when she met Spike Jonze.