CHAPTER 18 Meryl the Stateswoman

With all due respect, sir, I have done battle every single day of my life, and many men have underestimated me before.—Margaret Thatcher

(The Iron Lady, 2011)

Becoming Margaret Thatcher took a small village. Meryl flew to London three times to meet prosthetics expert Mark Coulier, who crafted an uncanny disguise that could fool anyone into believing she was the British stateswoman from middle age to her eighties. She would joke that, when she looked in the mirror, she saw her father instead. Beyond the audience, she most desired to fake out her fellow actors so they saw a person and not a mask. The voice was another factor. While running for prime minister on the Conservative ticket, Thatcher worked with a coach to alter the way she sounded so that voters (and male colleagues) would pay attention—and respect.

“She already had whatever the stentorian tones [were] that she acquired over time—they were all lying in wait there, within her arsenal,” Meryl said. “She had… a plummy kind of aspirant, upper-middle-class voice, and so what the voice coach did was enable her to expand her breath, deepen her voice, bring it to a place where men could listen to it in its most emphatic tones.”

Thatcher’s primary goal was to “win the argument,” she explained. Her approach “had to do with bringing out a word that you didn’t normally think was the most important word in the sentence. And she also had a way, like a railroad train, of taking a breath quite quietly and making a point in a way that you don’t realize that this point is going to be made through several examples, and there will not be a break in the speaking voice at any point, and if you think you’re going to interrupt her, you’re not going to have the opportunity, because she’s just got capacity.”

That infinite lung power left Meryl breathless. She couldn’t keep pace. The production, helmed by Mamma Mia! director Phyllida Lloyd, commenced in the winter of 2011, with Manchester Town Hall representing Parliament. In January, Meryl observed Conservative prime minister David Cameron debate Labour leader Ed Miliband as part of her research. Thatcher, in office from 1979 to 1990, addressed members of Parliament, or MPs, twice weekly. Presiding over a resurgent economy in the 1980s, she was the UK’s equivalent of Ronald Reagan. Iron Lady dramatizes her decision to declare war on Argentina after its invasion of the Falkland Islands, a British colony, in 1982. She won that battle, but, on the home front, her detractors deeply resented policies that reduced government spending for education and housing. When the IRA bombed a Brighton hotel during the 1984 Conservative Party convention, Thatcher and husband Denis (played by Jim Broadbent) were nearly killed.

It goes without saying that Meryl was extraordinary, notably in scenes where elderly, widowed Margaret battles dementia. Outraged British politicos accused the movie of exploiting Thatcher’s mental decline while she was still alive. Thatcher died of a stroke in April 2013 at the age of eighty-seven; neither she nor her children saw Iron Lady when it premiered the year before, drawing mixed reviews but near-unanimous praise for Meryl’s performance. Roger Ebert bestowed two out of four stars for what he protested was Lloyd’s wishy-washy take on the divisive figure. The Chicago Sun-Times critic once witnessed Thatcher at a gathering of bigwigs in the Windy City. “Invisible psychic threads of respect and yearning extended toward her from the men,” he recalled. “When she spoke, they fell silent. No one interrupted. No one disagreed. Her pronouncements were issued as recitals of fact. It was the most remarkable display of personal authority I have ever seen. The Iron Lady suggests that only indirectly.” He goes on to assess that “Streep is flawless, but the film, like a great many people at the time, is uncertain how to approach her.”

Finding herself at the helm of a rare biopic about a woman politician, perhaps Meryl felt obligated to present Thatcher in a somewhat neutral, unclouded way, placing the burden on the audience to form an opinion. The outspoken liberal didn’t match Thatcher politically but admired “her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class bound and gender-phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement. To have won it, not because she inherited position as the daughter of a great man, or the widow of an important man, but by dint of her own striving.… I see that as evidence of some kind of greatness, worthy for the argument of history to settle.”

During her Iron Lady media blitz, Meryl pledged $1 million toward the establishment of the National Women’s History Museum in Washington. She wanted to support an institution where women’s place in history, relegated to sidebars in textbooks, could be collected, archived, and publicized to showcase “incredible stories that we don’t know anything about.”

Iron Lady, a Weinstein Company release, did a respectable $30 million in North America and scored Meryl her seventeenth Oscar nomination and third win. It had been awhile—twenty-nine years, to be exact. The cherry on top: Roy Helland finally won an Academy Award, sharing the Best Makeup prize with Coulier.

“When they called my name I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, ‘Oh no! Oh, c’mon why? Her? Again?’ You know? But, whatever,” she said, choking up as she thanked Don and her “other partner,” Roy.

Winning top honors at the Golden Globes one month earlier, Meryl credited Harvey Weinstein in an acceptance speech that later came back to haunt her. Somewhat begrudgingly, she called him “God” and “the punisher, Old Testament, I guess.” Michelle Williams, forced to sit next to Harvey, laughed as the power broker shook his head during the televised ceremony. Williams won Best Actress, Musical or Comedy, for My Week with Marilyn, which Harvey produced. Another producer on the biopic later recalled “creepy, stalkerish” Harvey showing up unannounced when Williams filmed nude scenes. For Williams, standing up to a notorious bully could have severe consequences. Harvey used his clout to intimidate and silence women, and to destroy their reputations when they rejected his casting-couch overtures. By contrast, Meryl appeared to have a Thatcher-esque effect on Harvey. He treated her as an equal. Maybe he feared her, too.

After Margaret, Meryl worked nonstop playing eight roles over four years. First, she joined Tommy Lee Jones in the David Frankel dramedy Hope Springs, a sobering portrait of a long-married Nebraska couple undergoing counseling to rekindle the flame. Kay is a lonely, traditional wife who cooks and cleans up after her cantankerous husband, Arnold, who barely acknowledges that she’s there. They sleep in separate bedrooms. When Kay, who works at a Coldwater Creek store, spends her savings on therapy sessions, Arnold puts up a fight. According to Arnold, marriage “means we have a marriage license and I pay all the bills.” He finally agrees to do the work of repairing the relationship because the thought of losing Kay is too much. Who else will do the dishes? Fold the laundry? Make the meals? Tell me why she doesn’t divorce his ass?

Again, Meryl was attempting to restore dignity to an invisible woman we’ve met before and might not fully appreciate. But it’s maddening to see Meryl hobbled by a power imbalance that favors an obnoxious man. Jones, who was in awe of his costar, fit the role like a well-worn glove. At the August 2012 premiere, Meryl told me, “I heard somebody describe him in this movie as ‘50 Shades of Grumpy’! And I loved it. I said, ‘I’m stealing that!’ So I’m letting you have it.” She hoped other husbands would learn from Arnold’s example and open themselves up to change.

Two years later, Meryl did Jones a solid by taking a super-small role in The Homesman, his directorial debut. The 1850s period drama stars the actor as a drifter driving three sick pioneer women back home to Iowa; Grace Gummer played a catatonic nineteen-year-old who’s lost three children to diphtheria. Unlike Evening, featuring Mamie and Meryl in separate scenes, Grace got to share screen time with her mother, who played a kindly minister’s wife offering shelter to the passengers. The Homesman might have benefited from more Meryl: it grossed $2.4 million to Hope Springs’ $64 million.

In other dreary dramas: please see Meryl’s turn as a cruel matriarch terrorizing her dysfunctional family. August: Osage County, filmed near Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the fall of 2012, was based on Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play of the same name. Violet Weston, who suffers from mouth cancer and prescription drug addiction, needles daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts) and pretty much everyone else. Meryl and Julia, who voiced animated insects in Ant Bully, are electric in their first live-action movie together. Cue the scene where Barbara wrests Violet’s pills away, screaming, “I run things now!” The best line, however, is Barbara scolding Violet at dinner: “Eat the fish, bitch!” (Perhaps this was retribution for Meryl’s anti–Pretty Woman remarks in the early ’90s.)

Meryl resisted the part many times. “I didn’t want to play this woman who is afflicted by her past and by cancer and by her own self,” she recalled. “She is detested by her children and quite rightly so. I didn’t want to imagine all that and to have to experience it.” But her agent pushed her to do it, saying, “We have to make this happen.” She changed her mind when a friend said, “You have to do this role for me and for every girl who has a bad mother.” She hardly enjoyed the experience. Neither did Julia, who was homesick for her family in California. “It was hard for Julia to get in that skin because the real Julia is so warm and engaging,” Meryl revealed. “You immediately connect with her, while Barbara is disappointed with all the doors in her life that are closing. It can be unpleasant to be inside the skins of certain characters.”

To re-create the ensemble feel of August: Osage County’s original Steppenwolf Theatre Company production, Meryl insisted her costars—Julia, Chris Cooper, and Abigail Breslin, among others—live together in a condo village behind a Toyota dealership. At the end of the day, the group would gather in Meryl’s apartment to eat and rehearse dialogue-heavy scenes. She would cook chicken, ribs, and chili topped with Fritos. “Thank God we had a contentious election happening at the same time,” she said. “I would unwind by going home and shouting at the news! That was my only relief.”

That October, reports surfaced that Meryl, in talks to headline Disney’s Into the Woods, was on the verge of accepting a character she long avoided: the Witch. But, oh, what a role it was. She would get to perform scenery-chewing songs from the classic Sondheim musical opposite Johnny Depp, James Corden, her Devil Wears Prada costar Emily Blunt, and her close friend Tracey Ullman. In the ensuing months, Disney assembled the rest of the cast and set a September 2013 start date to shoot in England. Before jetting across the pond, Meryl joined Jeff Bridges in The Giver, a Harvey-backed futuristic parable based on Lois Lowry’s acclaimed dystopian YA novel. She was to play the authoritarian Chief Elder, who outlaws the expression of emotion in her quest to form a perfect society. Harvey’s daughters reportedly grew up reading the book.

The Weinstein Company, which distributed Osage County, aimed to sell the catfight quotient between two major actresses. When the poster was revealed in October 2013, it showed Julia pushing Meryl to the ground, and, weeks before the movie’s December 27 release, the National Enquirer published a curious report that quoted an anonymous “Hollywood insider” alleging that Meryl never wanted to work with Julia again. Julia’s purported crime: suggesting that director John Wells change the ending to focus on Barbara driving away from home rather than the sad image of Violet alone, which test audiences panned. The popular blog Lainey Gossip called BS. “It’s possible for two powerful women of stature to co-exist perfectly amiably,” said writer Sarah Marrs. “Maybe Meryl and Julia won’t be exchanging Christmas cards, I don’t know. But any changes made to August aren’t because of girl sh*t, it’s just Harvey Weinstein being an asshole and thinking people can’t handle a sad movie.”

Although Meryl and Julia scored Oscar nods—Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively—it’s worth noting that Julia never worked with Harvey again. Nor did Meryl following The Giver. She began to draw more public attention to sexism in the entertainment industry, even coming for Walt Disney. In January 2014, Meryl blasted the sainted studio and theme park mogul during her fiery, funny, F-bomb-laden speech honoring Emma Thompson at a National Board of Review dinner. Thompson had just played Mary Poppins author P. L. Travers in Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks, which chronicled efforts by Disney (Tom Hanks) to obtain the rights to her stories about the resourceful governess. Disney’s daughters grew up reading them. Meryl was courted for the role but passed.

Onstage to toast Thompson, she shed light on why. “Disney, who brought joy, arguably, to billions of people, was perhaps, or had some… racist proclivities,” said Meryl. “He formed and supported an anti-Semitic industry lobby. And he was certainly, on the evidence of his company’s policies, a gender bigot.” To back her claim, she presented a 1938 rejection letter from Walt Disney Studio to an aspiring cartoonist named Mary Ford. “And I’m going to read it here in Emma’s tribute because I know it will tickle our honoree, because she’s also a rabid, man-eating feminist, like I am.” An excerpt from the aforementioned letter: Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that task is performed entirely by young men. For this reason, girls are not considered for the training school.

Watching Mr. Banks, “I could just imagine Walt Disney’s chagrin at having to cultivate P. L. Travers’ favor for [the] 20 years that it took to secure the rights to her work. It must have killed him to encounter, in a woman, an equally disdainful and superior creature, a person dismissive of his own, considerable gifts and prodigious output and imagination.”

Meryl’s attack on the beloved cultural icon made headlines. Disney defenders disputed the charges. His grandniece, Abigail Disney, however, gave Meryl her stamp of approval, posting on Facebook: “Anti-Semite? Check. Misogynist? OF COURSE!! Racist? C’mon he made a film (Jungle Book) about how you should ‘stay with your own kind’ at the height of the fight over segregation!… But damn, he was hella good at making films and his work has made billions of people happy. There’s no denying it. So there ya go. Mixed feelings up the wazoo.”

Soon after, Meryl lined up Fox’s Suffragette, playing British activist Emmeline Pankhurst, and TriStar Pictures’ Ricki and the Flash, picking up the guitar in a juicy role written by Diablo Cody. The Suffragette shoot kicked off in London in February. Meryl boasted little screen time in comparison to Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter, yet her gravitas overshadows the entire film—and rightfully so. Pankhurst, the godmother of the women’s suffrage movement in turn-of-the-century England, inspired legions of activists to break windows, set fires, and wreak havoc to get men in power to change laws that made women second-class citizens. When Meryl, channeling Pankhurst, comes out of hiding to fire up Mulligan and other suffragettes, it’s hard not to become radicalized by her passion and powers of persuasion.

“We have been left with no alternative but to defy this government!” she intones. “If we must go to prison to obtain the vote, let it be the windows of government, not the bodies of women, that shall be broken! I incite this meeting and all the women in Britain to rebellion! I would rather be a rebel than a slave!” She advises Mulligan, “Never surrender. Never give up the fight.”

In the fall of 2015, Meryl and Mulligan found themselves the subjects of controversy over a Time Out London photoshoot that featured the costars wearing T-shirts with the slogan “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave,” inspired by a speech Pankhurst gave in 1913. The images, meant to promote Suffragette, backfired on American social media, generating complaints about insensitivity and ignorance of the quote’s reference to slavery. The writer Ijeoma Oluo tweeted, “No matter how well-intentioned, educated, liberal, when [there’s] only white people in the room, shit like this happens.”

Responding, Time Out said it had invited the actresses to appear in the shoot, calling the message tees “a rallying cry, and absolutely not intended to [criticize] those who have no choice but to submit to oppression.”

Meryl stayed mum. She wasn’t immune to making mistakes, such as the unwittingly tone-deaf decision, as a white woman, to sport the shirt in the first place—yet another sign, critics argued, that intersectional feminism was still a concept, and not even close to reality.

If Meryl didn’t know better then, she’s certainly removed her privileged blinders today. When Meryl joined the Time’s Up campaign against sexual harassment in January 2018, she and fellow wealthy and famous power players Reese Witherspoon and Shonda Rhimes each donated $500,000 to establish a legal defense fund for victims of workplace misconduct in industries such as food services and construction. According to the National Women’s Law Center, which oversees the fund, 40 percent of the women seeking help in October 2018 were women of color, and 65 percent were low income. Earlier that year, Meryl brought Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, as her date to the Golden Globe Awards. She ceded the spotlight to the Taiwanese American labor activist during a joint red-carpet interview with Ryan Seacrest. “This is a movement where there’s space for everyone and there’s a role for everyone,” said Poo.

Rewinding back to 2015 and that Time Out feature. Meryl also drew ire for her response to the magazine’s question, “Are you a feminist?” She said, “I’m a humanist, I am for nice, easy balance.” The comment confused many of her fans, given Meryl’s feminist bona fides and work that year urging Congress to support the long-dormant equal rights amendment. In 1990, the year of her gutsy SAG keynote, a male reporter asked whether she was a feminist. “It’s a dull subject,” she answered. “I’m definitely a humanist and I believe in women’s rights.”

All told, when Meryl became famous, she had no qualms declaring in public arenas from the Washington Post to the Oscars press room that, yes, she’s a feminist. Perhaps, as she got older, she grew tired of even having to answer the question.

Let’s be clear: Meryl’s next character wouldn’t be caught dead at a Pankhurst rally. Ricki and her band, the Flash, play to near-empty bars in Tarzana, California. With boyfriend Greg (Rick Springfield!) on guitar, the raspy-voiced singer covers “American Girl,” “Bad Romance,” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” She doesn’t seem especially introspective or informed. She cracks jokes about Obama and twice voted for Dubya because she supports the troops. Meryl reached deep down into her lower register to make the rock chick sound like Cher or Chrissie Hynde.

Ricki abandoned her family years ago to pursue rock stardom (or lack thereof) out West. She gets a reality check when ex-husband Peter (Kevin Kline) summons her home to Indianapolis to reconnect with their daughter Julie (Mamie), who attempted suicide. Julie is divorcing an unfaithful husband. (Ricki didn’t even go to the wedding.)

A parallel to real life: Mamie split from Benjamin Walker in March 2013 after less than two years of marriage. “It’s very amicable,” the twenty-nine-year-old’s rep said at the time. Weeks earlier, The CW pulled the plug on Mamie’s short-lived medical drama, Emily Owens, M.D. After the uncoupling announcement, she and Meryl were spotted hanging out in Vancouver, and, one year later, Mamie snapped up a two-bedroom bachelorette pad in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Though she was moving on, the ordeal doubtless triggered pain when filming Ricki and the Flash alongside Meryl in suburban New York. Julie is a ball of anger and grief; Ricki is an unexpected oasis of calm. Ricki goes with the flow, unlike Julie’s devoted, tightly wound stepmother (Audra McDonald). She motivates Julie to muster the courage to attend her brother’s wedding, even if it conjures memories of happier times. “Don’t run away,” she says. “Walk on.”

Ricki is among my favorite Meryl roles precisely because nobody saw her coming. Director Jonathan Demme, a music buff, requested live performances, so sixty-five-year-old Meryl spent months learning to shred. Her acoustic solo of Ricki’s original song “Cold One” is sublime. For fans of A Star Is Born crooner Jackson Maine: this is Meryl’s “Maybe It’s Time.”

She wasn’t ready to stop singing. She planned to jump from Ricki to opera legend Maria Callas in an HBO movie directed by Mike Nichols. The project, based on Terrence McNally’s play Master Class, never came to fruition. Nichols, eighty-three, died of cardiac arrest on November 20, 2014. In a statement, Meryl eulogized her collaborator as an “inspiration and joy to know, a director who cried when he laughed, a friend without whom, well, we can’t imagine our world, an indelible irreplaceable man.”

Meryl plunged into a new role that would make Nichols laugh through tears. Instead of hitting the high notes as a world-renowned soprano, she screeched arias with abandon to play the most infamous opera singer in history. Afterward, she would go to bat for the First Amendment.

CHAPTER 18

Meryl the Stateswoman

INTERMISSION