Meryl Streep: A Tough Act to Follow

Q: Did you have a religious upbringing?

A: Well, I went to Sunday school but I was thrown out for misbehaving. I was 12.

Q: Was it for making faces? Peter Lorre once said, "I don't act, I just make faces."

A: Well, may be true.

Q: But not with you?

A: I don't think it's true with him either, frankly. But sometimes people say things to deflect attention from what they're really doing, because what they're really doing is kind of embarrassing when you think about it. You wouldn't want people to think you're really feeling these things. And for men that is a problem. And then you've got men who are proud of their gushing.

Q: I've always felt that actors of Brando's era felt acting was somewhat emasculating, whereas the next generation of actors, like De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman, didn't feel that way.

A: I agree, but it's precisely because the people you mention have consciously moved from characters that are either very strong or fiercely masculine to other more softer kinds of roles. It's because they've kept their feet in both places that they can maintain. I think if they played only strong men, there's something faintly ridiculous about people who do just that. But those guys--you just never know what they're going to be doing. It just always amazes me.

Q: Are there lots of actors like that?

A: There's lots of people. But you bring up the names because I don't want to pick out anybody and leave out anybody else.

Q: Does De Niro have genius?

A: Yes, sure. If that means that it's something that's visited upon him, like he's touched by an ability to do something at once of himself and larger than himself, yeah, I would say that's so.

Q: Are there any actors you haven't worked with yet who you would like to?

A: Yes, there are a lot of good actors I haven't acted with. But I don't want to say because then it becomes, "She didn't say me." That makes me uncomfortable. Duvall. Duvall. I would give anything to work with him.

Q: You've worked with three major actors: Nicholson, Hoffman, De Niro. Do they act similarly or are they each very different?

A: Nicholson, who and De Niro? [Laughs] Hoffman?

Q: Hoffman said during Kramer vs. Kramer that he wanted to kill you.

A: He didn't mean that. He meant it in one scene--he was mad because I wasn't mad. I forget what it was about. In the end he agreed with me. But with him everything is a competition, that's what gets his juices going: who's winning. And in that piece, that was appropriate. But actors like the ones you name--they all work very differently, just as directors all work differently. My mother said, after I made The Deer Hunter, "What was it like to act with Robert De Niro?" And I said, "I have no idea because it just felt like nothing, it was effortless, it felt like air." Just being in the room with that soldier.

Q: Like dancing with Fred Astaire?

A: Yeah. It was like being in love. You don't feel the other things around you.

Q: Does he also bring out the best in you?

A: Uh-huh. Yes. And he loves what he does. Most of the leading men I've worked with have that in common. Dustin really loves what he does, he really loves it. That makes it fun.

Q: You've called Nicholson the Mick Jagger of motion pictures. What does that mean?

A: It just means that he struts through all this with the confidence that nobody else has. He owns it. He really loves it. Does it, loves it, is good at it, gives pleasure to millions and millions of people, and he doesn't seem beset by the same insecurities as a lot of people. He seems like in the pantheon . . . and there forever.

Q: After Ironweed, Nicholson went into Batman and got $11 million. You complained that you've never been offered anything like that. Can you address the inequities between men and women of your stature in your profession?

A: What I was talking about was the inequity even when you're the lead in a gigantically grossing major motion picture, as a woman you'll never come up to what a man can claim to make or deserve after the same sort of motion picture. Even if he had four in a row that didn't make any money at all, it doesn't matter.

Q: Why is that?

A: I don't know. I don't know.

Q: You've called it a guy's game.

A: Yeah.

Q: Can it be changed? Jodie Foster says that women must work from within to make the changes.

A: I don't think you can accept it. When I was talking about that, I was talking about how across the board for all women in America in every station of life this seems to be true. I used that as an example: if I, who am on the top end of the female earners in the country, feel this, then I know that it goes right through society. I hear it from everyone. But what are you going to do, quit the human race?

Q: How competitive are you?

A: Well, [on this picture] I always ask to see what Goldie's wearing for a scene before I know what I'm wearing. [Laughs] When I was a kid I used to be very competitive, because I was sort of geeky and I wanted to prove that I was cool. But I really grew against it in high school. I didn't like competition.

Q: Was that when you decided to make yourself over?

A: Oh, that was my first interview with Newsweek and ever since then I'm always being asked, "You made yourself over?" I peroxided my hair like every single other 15-year-old in America in '65 or whenever it was. It's no big deal.

Q: You were a high-school cheerleader and homecoming queen. Those are pretty competitive areas, especially for boys.

A: True. When I got into Vassar--it was an all-girl's school and the element of competing for boys was removed--I felt a freedom that I never had before. I felt like a human being as opposed to someone defined just by gender and how I looked. So I don't think I'm that competitive. It's very fashionable now to say you are ambitious and competitive.

Q: A lot of the younger actresses like Demi Moore, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts say it.

A: I am ambitious for my work, but I'm not ambitious to get ahead. I didn't like being in competition with my friends at Yale. It was one of my unhappiest periods of my whole life: standing every few months in a lineup and being picked for roles. Or not. Out of the same five or six people in my class. It gave me an ulcer.

Q: Were you friends with your competition?

A: Yes, I was friends with them. So it was very strained.

Q: And did you always get the parts?

A: Yeah. That was part of the strain.

Q: Are the others still in the profession?

A: Three are acting. One runs a theater.

Q: Why did you want to stay in the profession if it had such an ulcerous affect on you?

A: I went to a psychiatrist at Yale because it was free [Laughs], which was fantastic. I went once. Spent a long time in there. He said, "Look, you're graduating in three months. It will never, ever, ever be this intense and hard in your life." And he was right.

Q: Did you ever suffer from stage fright?

A: Yes, always.

Q: What about today?

A: I haven't been on a stage in 10 years. Not since Alice in Concert and then Alice at the Palace.

Q: How important was Joe Papp to you?

A: Joe Papp was very important. He was the most important. He gave me my first job at the Public Theater. It was my first Broadway job. Trelawny of the "Wells." I came in out of nowhere and he gave me a chance. Just on blind faith. I auditioned and he hired me for a major part for a production in Lincoln Center. I was right out of drama school. Never done anything.

Q: Who did you call first when you got that job?

A: [Shouting, laughing] My mother! It was really exciting. In the rehearsals, he hadn't even seen if I could walk onstage in front of an audience, and he said, "I'm looking for something for you in the summer. I'm going to put you in the Park. I want you to do Isabella in Measure for Measure. And I'm thinking of maybe a French princess in Henry V." Both of those roles that same summer. I mean, that was an extraordinary chance. He was an irascible, crazy, maddening person but he was very loyal to me. He was very good to me, personally and for my career. He was infuriating to a lot of other people but I'll beat up anybody who says he wasn't a great man.

Q: Didn't Joe Papp predict that you would run into a lot of frustration in Hollywood?

A: It's a frustrating business, but I have run into a great deal of good fortune and satisfaction and challenge. There's nothing better than working, so who can ever complain about that?

Q: At least if you're happy.

A: You can't work when you're not feeling juiced. When you're not happy.

Q: Is Woody Allen happy?

A: He's happy in his own way.

Q: How was it to work with him on Manhattan?

A: I worked with him three days. I think he said seven things to me. I didn't really get to know him. But I had a long talk with Julie Kavner once and she said the same thing. She said, "I've made so many pictures with him and he suddenly sat down and talked to me on the last one." He's just not that forthcoming on the set. He's not there to have a good time. He's just so focused. You have to be. He's thinking of three things ahead.

Q: How far ahead were you thinking when you decided to take singing lessons at the age of 12?

A: That wasn't my idea, it was the idea of a friend of my father's who heard me in a concert. He was a musician and he told this famous teacher [Estelle Liebling] about me and she came and heard me. Then she took me as a student. She was a great teacher of opera. I was a callous, callow youth and didn't know the worth of what I was being introduced to.

Q: Did you really follow Beverly Sills in those lessons?

A: Yes. I sat in the hall and listened to her when I was 12. She wasn't anybody at that time. My mother bought us tickets to see her debut at the City Center Opera. It was a big deal. Then she became Beverly Sills.

Q: Well, your appreciation of the arts seems to have started early. What about literature? Were there any books or writers you read as a kid?

A: I didn't read anything while I was in high school. I mean I read Nancy Drew and Calling All Girls, the magazine. I wasn't a great reader until I became a grownup. And now with all these kids I don't have any time to finish a sentence let alone pick up a book.

Q: During your formative years, in the '60s, did you ever read any of the counterculture gurus like Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffmann, Jerry Rubin?

A: No. Nothing got in. When I went to Vassar a lot of the girls would run up to Timothy Leary's place that was nearby, but it just didn't appeal to me.

Q: What about during the Vietnam War? Were you involved in any of the protests? Did you have a boyfriend who had to deal with it?

A: I had a boyfriend there, yes. In Vietnam. He got in trouble, went AWOL and was in the hoosegow. What did they call it, Long Binh? Came back a heroin addict. Sweet guy.

Q: What was your consciousness then?

A: My consciousness was I didn't want him to go. It was just a personal thing. I was against the war like everybody else, but I wasn't very political. Mainly because I didn't like the night rallies--they were obnoxious. And I was very cynical.

Q: Were you at Yale when Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang were there?

A: They were there the year before me.

Q: Three years after you graduated from Yale, you received the first of your so-far nine Oscar nominations, for The Deer Hunter. You lost that one but won in '79 for Kramer. Fellow Yalie Jodie Foster, who has now won two of them, said you don't learn by winning Oscars but rather by disappointments. Is that true?

A: You learn humility.

Q: When you lose?

A: No. You can be an arrogant loser. But [when you win] that moment passes very quickly, and when you're in your car it's, "Now what?" You're in the same position.

Q: Does an Oscar make a difference?

A: I think it does help people get employed who are beginning or marginal. It opens up opportunities. It does. If you're already established, I don't know if it enhances it. It might mean something being nominated so many times. It has put some kind of an onus on me. I'm not able to come to a potential writer, producer, director as fresh.

Q: Michael Cimino predicted that you'd be the Eleanor Roosevelt of acting.

A: I still don't know what that means. Dustin said that.

Q: Hoffman, not Cimino?

A: Yeah.

Q: Sally Field praised you, saying that you had an aura, a sophistication, something regal. Do you sense that other people feel this about you?

A: Yes. And you're aware as you go along in your career of what's said about you becoming encased in cement like the handprints on Hollywood Boulevard. What I am to myself, what my potential is, is much more fluid and volatile. I'm beset by the same insecurities and outsized overconfidence that I had when I was young. It's always a mix.

Q: Is producing in your future?

A: I have produced four major things in the last 12 years--and I have to concentrate on them. I don't have any time for anything else.

Q: So motherhood eliminates any thought of directing as well?

A: You bet.

Q: What about bringing home what you do? Are you able to leave your work behind you?

A: I have to. I am not allowed to bring it home. I am not even allowed to sing at my house. "Mommy stop." Nobody told me when you have children you're not allowed to sing anymore. Even when they're 18 months, you start to sing and they go, "No, no, no, stop, no, me!"

Q: How old's your oldest?

A: My son's 12.

Q: Does he have his own phone yet?

A: He shares it with his sisters.

Q: But he has a separate line?

A: Yes. We never did at home in Connecticut, but here we moved into a house that had four lines, so naturally ... I'm not going to call them up and cancel it.

Q: And are any of your younger children into making money?

A: My eight-year-old is--she's out on the street selling bougainvillea flowers off the front vine.

Q: Mine crushes flowers into perfume and sells it for 50 cents.

A: Oh, she's very reasonable. We don't sell anything under a dollar.

Q: Do you ever meet with your children's classmates and talk about what you do?

A: If I'm not working, yes. I do some things but not enough. I went to my son's school and talked to kids. I went to my daughter's school last year. But I haven't camped out or anything. Although I am a camp counselor every summer at my house. My house is like camp. A lot of kids.

Q: Perhaps this has been the reason you've drifted towards comedy even though your strength is as a dramatic actress. Are you consciously looking to diversify?

A: No. This movie is certainly different from Postcards From the Edge or from Defending Your Life. There are comedies and there are comedies. There are some that are relatively attached to real life and real things. I look at them as different countries really, those pictures. The demands on me for Defending Your Life were minimal. It was a fluke that I was here and able to do it. The timing was right, I met Albert [Brooks] and he seduced me with the telling of it. He never let me read it, he just told me the whole story, and I was just charmed by him. But that was a completely different task from what I am attempting here. Death Becomes Her is really very physical, farcical, outlandish.

Q: What is it about?

A: It's about living forever--and being young and beautiful forever, which is an interesting prospect. And it's about vanity. What's the price of that? And wouldn't we all spend it? Or would we? I also like my character, who is unrelentingly evil, an undilutedly selfish person. Which is fun. Unleavened by any kindness or any shred of any softer human emotion. She is sort of an amalgam of a lot of people whom I wouldn't ever, ever care to identify [laughs]

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Lawrence Grobel interviewed Danny DeVito for our July cover story.

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