I suppose I do have one unembarrassed passion. I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.—Susan Orlean
(Adaptation, 2002)
In the fall of 1999, Meryl received a Gotham Award for Lifetime Achievement at Chelsea Piers in New York. The star-studded gala doubled as a fundraiser for indie filmmakers; Ethan and Joel Coen were there as well as Michael Moore and Darren Aronofsky. Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein made a dumb joke while presenting her prize: “We co-starred in the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Boy, was she awful.” The next year, she tied with Katharine Hepburn for a record twelve Oscar nominations, arriving to the March 26 ceremony wearing a Mary McFadden power suit in a sea of gowns and tuxedos. Meryl’s date: her thirteen-year-old daughter, Grace. Inside the Shrine Auditorium: Hilary Swank was crowned Best Actress for her bravura performance in the indie Boys Don’t Cry; cynical midlife crisis drama American Beauty swept the awards, winning Best Picture and Best Actor for Kevin Spacey, who briefly appeared in Heartburn as a stickup man robbing Rachel Samstat’s group therapy session. On this glittery night, Spacey was a full-fledged movie star without a glimmer of a notion that his peers would expel him, along with Harvey, amid damaging and credible #MeToo reports in 2017.
Miramax handled international distribution for The Hours, one of two acclaimed pictures starring Meryl in 2002. The other was Sony Pictures’ Adaptation, an experimental black comedy that catapulted the soccer mom to a level of cool she hadn’t projected since Postcards from the Edge. She credited Sony exec Amy Pascal for insisting she star in the sexy role of Susan Orlean. “At a studio headed by a man they’d have said, ‘Ooh no, why?’” said Meryl. “They don’t want to see their first wife in the movie, and that’s what I make them think of. But Amy wants to see herself.”
She also had Spike Jonze to thank for her brand-new hipster sparkle. The wunderkind, in his early thirties, had transitioned from directing high-profile music videos to movies; his 1999 debut, the surreal Being John Malkovich, established Jonze as an innovative young talent who could visualize the words of the gifted, eccentric screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. The collaborators partnered up again on Adaptation, the riveting product of Kaufman’s struggle to adapt journalist Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief for Columbia Pictures.
Rather than faithfully interpreting the nonfiction bestseller, Kaufman fictionalized events into a meta-movie: Charlie, a bundle of nerves and self-loathing, suffers from writer’s block. He hits a wall with his Orchid Thief gig and is too scared to talk to Orlean about it. By comparison, his dopey twin brother, Donald, a well-adjusted ray of sunshine, writes a shockingly successful script for a psychological thriller. Donald helps Charlie by pretending to be him while meeting Orlean in New York. He senses something off about her, like she’s not telling the full truth.
The siblings follow Orlean to deepest Florida, where they spy her canoodling and getting high with the subject of The Orchid Thief: the passionate, obsessive, and offbeat-handsome John Laroche. The outlaw horticulturist has forged a black market career smuggling the wild ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii from a nature preserve. Pointing a gun, a furious Orlean—whose passion for Laroche has blossomed into full-fledged mania—forces the Kaufmans to drive to the swamp, where she intends to kill them. The once-passive wallflower who studied characters more daring than she is now a person who might interest a literary journalist scouting her next New York Times best seller. Laroche accidentally shoots and kills Donald; karma arrives in the form of an alligator, which drags the orchid thief underwater. Orlean is arrested, and Charlie finally finishes his screenplay, having learned from Donald such valuable lessons as having the guts to believe in your art and put it out into the world.
Donald’s contagious positive energy mirrors that of Laroche, both the real man and Kaufman’s fictional interpretation. In The Orchid Thief, published in 1998, Orlean wrote of Laroche, “One of his greatest assets is optimism—that is, he sees a profitable outcome in practically every life situation, including disastrous ones. Years ago he spilled toxic pesticide into a cut on his hand and suffered permanent heart and liver damage from it. In his opinion, it was all for the best because he was able to sell an article about the experience (‘Would You Die for Your Plants?’) to a gardening journal.” Laroche’s orchid fervor rubbed off on Orlean, although the contributing New Yorker writer initially objected to Kaufman representing the character of “Susan Orlean” as a twisted, lunatic caricature of herself.
“It was a complete shock,” she recalled. “My first reaction was ‘Absolutely not!’ They had to get my permission and I just said: ‘No! Are you kidding? This is going to ruin my career!’ Very wisely, they didn’t really pressure me. They told me that everybody else had agreed and I somehow got emboldened. It was certainly scary to see the movie for the first time. It took a while for me to get over the idea that I had been insane to agree to it, but I love the movie now.”
It helped that Meryl Streep was playing her.
“It was great because she wasn’t trying to impersonate me and because she’s amazing!” said Orlean. “She created the character just through knowing me from the book. It’s actually one of my favorite performances by her. Maybe I’m a little prejudiced, but how could I not be? I really like her portrayal of this strange creature!”
Meryl didn’t meet Orlean until the first screening. She felt a “teensy bit guilty for not interviewing her” beforehand but also knew that “we were not doing a docudrama here.” She didn’t want to be “diverted by the truth.” Meryl boarded Adaptation in the fall of 2000, joining Nicolas Cage (Charlie/Donald) and Chris Cooper (Laroche); bubbling with ideas and emotion, it was just about the best script she’d ever read. Jonze’s efficiency and “cold steel intelligence” impressed Meryl, who no doubt values those aspects of her own personality. “He’s so prepared,” she said. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is for an actor, because it doesn’t always happen that way.”
At first, she intimidated him. How much direction would she want or not want? What if he insulted her? On day one, she made Jonze feel at ease. Meryl could not stop smiling from the moment she started shooting the LA-based movie in the spring of 2001. She would get the giggles, nearly shutting down the set. Her exuberance reached its zenith in a scene where Orlean snorts orchid powder and talks on the phone to Laroche. “‘Well, we got all night. We can just do whatever you want,’” Meryl recalled Jonze saying. “My heart sank. I thought, ‘Oh no, I have to invent here.’ So I had a ball. It was endless. I was breathing on, and then writing on, a plate glass window with my nose. They didn’t put that in. Somewhere there’s a nine-act play of me being stoned up in this hotel room.”
The part that Jonze kept in is pure joy—with an undercurrent of sadness. Orlean, who wondered what it would be like to have Laroche’s passion, asks the flower hunter to join her in harmonizing a dial-tone sound. She’s silly yet lonely and yearning to connect to a kindred spirit. Off camera, Meryl made another request of Chris Cooper. “She saw that my acting problem is that I take things too seriously,” said Cooper, whom Meryl described as a “volatile” personality (in other words, a perfect Laroche). “During the middle of some takes, I got really frustrated, and she passed by and gently whispered, ‘Stop whining.’ It was like a great director’s single note—that’s all I needed, and I’m eternally grateful.”
Asked later if she had a Larochian passion, Meryl demurred to Interview magazine: “In spurts. And then there’s the laziness factor.” She had confessed to being lazy in previous interviews, as if to downplay her hard work and ambition to achieve excellence for herself and colleagues like Cooper. Meryl had a big life, filled with obligations, so we might assume the L-word to mean she wasn’t purely driven by professional success—that the type B side of her luxuriated in those quiet moments between movie sets, award shows, and media appearances. On One True Thing, Carl Franklin was amazed to see Meryl drop character while stepping out of a scene. “It’s not a big deal to her,” he said. “She’s not real precious about it, which I found interesting.”
That might be owing to her theater training. On August 13, 2001, Meryl finally returned to the stage in Mike Nichols’s Central Park revival of The Seagull. It had been twenty long years. She charmed as the fading actress Irina Arkadina opposite a starry cast: Kevin Kline, Christopher Walken, Natalie Portman, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. “Two decades in front of movie cameras haven’t diminished her capacity for looming large from a stage, and with a head-to-toe physicality that gives the lie to Pauline Kael’s famous suggestion that Ms. Streep acts only from the neck up,” wrote the New York Times’ Ben Brantley, quipping that Meryl “gives expansively to her fellow cast members, feeding them emotional cues that they mostly fail to pick up on.”
September was a somber month. A couple of weeks after the Twin Towers fell, Meryl’s mother, Mary, died of complications from heart disease at New York Hospital. She was eighty-six. During a magazine interview in September 2002, before the anniversaries of her double heartbreaks, Meryl was feeling fragile. “This just doesn’t seem like the right time to be talking about me,” she said.
Fame could be rough. She constantly felt tired or deficient, like she wasn’t paying attention to the right things, from managing her career to working out. She was so grateful to her family. But she was very, very excited about Adaptation and The Hours. In December, the movies opened back-to-back in specialty theaters before going wide two months later. The latter film took longer to make, requiring reshoots one year after principal photography ended; director Stephen Daldry had undergone the herculean task of filming three different movies and editing them together into one coherent narrative. Copy that for playwright David Hare, who worked with Meryl on Plenty and was tasked with adapting Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, which traces a day in the lives of three women affected by the Virginia Woolf classic Mrs Dalloway. Nicole Kidman wore a prosthetic nose to play the suicidal Woolf; Julianne Moore exuded glamour and desperation as Laura Brown, a suburban 1950s housewife who abandons her young son; and Meryl, whom Julianne found “very funny” and “really bossy,” channeled a contemporary version of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway (a married society lady who’s planning a party but is preoccupied with memories of former love interests, including a woman she “had not the option” to be with).
Though modern-day Clarissa, an editor in New York, lives openly with partner Sally (Allison Janney), she seems more devoted to caring for her friend and ex-lover, poet Richard Brown (Ed Harris), who’s dying of AIDS. She’s hosting a shindig to celebrate a big literary award he received and obviously still hung up on what they once had; before the event, Richard commits suicide by jumping out of a window—in front of Clarissa.
Having spent time with Meryl, Hare “realized how powerful the tug is in her between duty and freedom, and that all her greatest performances are about that conflict. My two favorite performances of hers are in Silkwood—in which she is amazing [as a] woman [who] gets drawn into realizing what her duty is—and A Cry in the Dark. But the same conflict is there, clearly, in Sophie’s Choice, which is almost like a video game program for the things Meryl does best. One side of her is free-spirited, anarchic, and funny. The other expresses the nobility of duty.”
Meryl, he continues, is “so potent in The Hours because she’s playing to the ‘duty’ side of her character. She feels she must keep her friend Richard alive and inject into him the love of life that he lacks. She’s so heartbreaking because at a certain moment she realizes she has to let go—part of the power of the film is that not even Meryl Streep can keep another human being alive.”
Natasha Richardson recommended that Meryl read Cunningham’s book, and how could she not? She was in it. (Clarissa thinks she sees Meryl filming a movie in downtown Manhattan.) The movie role required her to go to places she would rather not have. “It was a nightmare,” she revealed. “And yet, this is why you sign up. You want the challenging work, you search for it, you berate your agent because it doesn’t exist. And then when it comes, the night before you’re supposed to shoot the scene, you think, Why did I say I would do this?”
In those moments of self-doubt, Don would tell her, “Keep going. Start by starting.” Although Meryl at times agonized over decisions, she wasn’t like delicate Clarissa, who was fixated in a time of her youth to an unhealthy degree. “Of necessity I live very much in my life, and I think Clarissa lives, in great measure, in the past,” she said.
Meryl, meanwhile, had found her way back to New York. The kids were older—aged eleven to twenty-three—and the city offered an artist couple like Meryl and Don access to a cultural scene they didn’t have in Connecticut or, for that matter, Los Angeles. “My family and friends are here, I understand life better here,” she explained. “I like the street, the action, the seasons.”
They lived in a five-story brick townhouse in Greenwich Village, a short subway ride away from Tribeca, where she moved into John Cazale’s apartment all those years ago. Back when she could hop on the train or attend a Broadway opening without being recognized. Losing Cazale had been difficult, but his death helped her focus on the important things in life: her loved ones and the arts.
Meryl’s experience with loss, and good men dying too young, propelled her to new heights—literally—during a heavenly encounter in Angels in America.