Meryl Streep, the best dramatic actress of her generation, talks about the drawbacks of getting so many oscar nominations, why she's never worked with Al Pacino and what a nice guy Bruce Willis is.
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Goldie Hawn's sister, Patti, looks worn out. She's the unit publicist for Universal's Death Becomes Her, which stars Goldie, Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis and Tracey Ullman, and is directed by Robert Zemeckis, whose Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Back to the Futures make him a curious choice to direct this blackest of black comedies. Given this cast, Patti's job has become harrowing these last few weeks of shooting. One movie magazine wants to put Streep, Hawn and Willis on their cover. The New York Times wants to hang around the set for a piece. Vogue is focusing on Meryl. And here I am at 10 a.m. waiting patiently for whatever moments Queen Meryl will grant.
That Streep, 43, has started talking may be indicative of where the pendulum has been swinging in Hollywood-- away from actresses over 40 and towards the younger ladies.
For most of her career, Meryl Streep has kept herself out of publicity's glare. With rare exceptions, she wasn't out hawking her brilliant work in Sophie's Choice, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Silkwood or A Cry in the Dark. Her work was her calling card. But her films weren't always seen by as many people as she would have liked. And, while she was paid in the millions, she wasn't the box-office attraction studios had hoped she'd be. Slowly, she became aware that she'd have to give a little more, that she'd have to start talking to the press. The studios had pushed Pacino and De Niro into talking. Even Streisand and Beatty had begun pushing their product. So when Postcards From the Edge was in the can, Meryl Streep demonstrated her talent to strangers of another profession. She flashed her radiant smile at the press, she laughed, she was friendly.
And again when She-Devil was done, there she was on the cover of magazines with Roseanne Barr, of all people. Gone was the otherworldly look she assumed when she graced covers as The French Lieutenant's Woman. Here was Mother Meryl, happy and confident. So glad to meet John and Jane Q. Public.
Still, there were conditions. She'd talk, but not at home. She'd hold forth, but on the set. Reporters would have to wait for their time with her, between takes, during lunch breaks. There'd be no extended time for in-depth explorations. Let Sean Young do that. When she wanted a forum to vent her concerns, she chose to testify before Congress against the use of Alar, a chemical used in growing fruit, which was eventually banned. And two years ago she delivered a scathing address to the Screen Actors Guild prophesying that, with the way movies were going, women would be eliminated altogether by the year 2010.
I stood watching Meryl for hours. She was sitting very still on a hospital gurney as Sydney Pollack, her Out of Africa director, played a doctor examining her. Pollack was in just for the day, and it was his scene. Prior to this moment, Bruce Willis, playing a wimpy plastic surgeon who leaves his girlfriend (Goldie) to marry her friend (Streep), has pushed Meryl down a flight of stairs in their home. But Meryl, as 52-year-old Madeline Ashton, has drunk a magic potion that will allow her to live forever, even though her neck is twisted grotesquely and her wrist flaps in every direction and she should be dead. This, of course, shocks Dr. Pollack, who will also discover that she has no heartbeat and that her temperature is below 80 degrees.
Now, if this sounds patently silly, it is. And to watch grownups playacting in this way can be fun at first. But not take after take. I mean, they're all taking it so seriously! Yet one can't help wondering whether it just may turn out to be a crowd-pleaser. That is, if crowds want to see Meryl playing bitchy, Goldie Hawn wearing a fat suit and Bruce "Die Hard" Willis portraying a nerd. Who knows, it just might make more money than all nine of the films Streep has gathered Oscar nominations for. But it's very doubtful that she'll be remembered for Death Becomes Her.
This comedic period of Streep's--which includes Postcards, She-Devil and last year's Defending Your Life--might be somewhat analogous to Marlon Brando's films in the '60s. Some were interesting because Brando is always an interesting actor. But there was also a sense of sorrow about them because you knew what he had done in the '50s. And you wanted that back. And just as Brando later returned with a vengeance with The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, so undoubtedly will Meryl Streep come back to the powerhouse acting that made directors as diverse as Pollack, Hector Babenco and Mike Nichols dub her the best in the business.
I tried to find out about her switch from heavy dramas to lighter comedies when we finally got together in her trailer during her lunch break. We talked again when shooting was over for the day and she had to sit in the makeup chair to have the latex around her neck carefully removed.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: Do you have a problem doing interviews? You've said before that it's a waste of time.
MERYL STREEP: I don't think that they're a waste of time at all. Bob Zemeckis said, "Meryl, if you want to be in movies, you have to be your own marketing person."
Q: Robert De Niro feels that if people are going to see his movies they'll go whether he does publicity for them or not. He isn't happy talking to the press. Do you feel the pressure?
A: Yeah, there is a pressure to publicize it. And you can sympathize because there's just so much product out now--how do you make this one stand out among all the others?
Q: Death Becomes Her is a zany picture. Were you interested in it immediately?
A: Yes I was, but I did think I was being offered the other part. [Laughs] I had no idea that the song-and-dance lady was supposed to be me. But I like what it's about, and I like the humor of it.
Q: Do you watch dailies?
A: Yes. But not always, because I've been sick. What I've seen I really like.
Q: What happens when you see something that you don't like?
A: I tell them! [Laughs] And ask them if they could reshoot it.
Q: And do they?
A: No [laughs again]. But I don't usually--I'm not that critical.
Q: Hector Babenco said when you made Ironweed that you showed him how to direct. What did he mean?
A: Mmm. I don't know, maybe he was just being cryptic. You mean I was there yammering at him in rushes?
Q: Did you know Goldie Hawn or Bruce Willis before this?
A: Yeah, Goldie was a friend. So was Tracey [Ullman]. But I didn't know Bruce at all. All I knew was what I read--and what I read was completely untrue. He just came to this thing with so much energy and willingness and lots of ideas, good-natured. Except for maybe Zemeckis and Scorsese, he's also seen more movies than anybody I've ever met. He has a lot of references.
Q: When did your movie references begin? Did anything you saw at an early age leave some indelible mark?
A: I remember the moment when I got it about Shakespeare and great literature. It was through Marlon Brando and audiovisual aids in high school. I was a sophomore and they showed us Julius Caesar. That whole production with James Mason, Gielgud, was unbelievable, fantastic. And I really heard the words. Before that I never paid attention because it was all so boring out of the mouth of the teacher.
Q: Was that the first time you saw Brando act?
A: Yeah. Then I searched his work out. I saw Streetcar and was a big fan.
Q: Is it true that your image of a movie star was Sandra Dee?
A: Yeah, when I was a little girl. She wasn't my idol, but that's what I thought a movie star was.
Q: Did you have any idols?
A: No, I didn't.
Q: In your Screen Actors Guild speech you said that if girls don't have role models they don't have dreams.
A: Yeah, but that's different from idols. I watched those ladies on the four o'clock movie with keen interest. All of them. And I do believe that it's important for there to be women of substance that are in that kind of hyperbolic fictional setting for little girls to look up to.
Q: You certainly qualify as a woman of substance. While many admire your work, how do you feel? Have any of your films surpassed your expectations?
A: They always surpass my expectations. There's such a time lapse from when I finish shooting and when I eventually see the movie--it's like not seeing somebody who you've been very close to for a long time, and then seeing them again. Immediately you're intimate with them, but something is different in the immutable distance and time that it's somehow changed. So that I'm never prepared for the movie that I see.
Q: Are you affected by the box-office mentality?
A: Oh, I'm horribly disappointed when people don't see what I consider some of my best work. Yeah, I'm very sad. But I know that I have a video life. Most of my fans are home with their children waiting for my films to come out on video. But I'm disappointed because certain things should be seen on the big screen. I was very proud of A Cry in the Dark, but it wasn't distributed widely enough for people to have seen it on the big screen.
Q: How does it affect your career when you put out a picture that gets critically acclaimed, as that one did, and doesn't do well commercially?
A: It doesn't affect my career choices. What affects your career choices are the three interesting scripts you get in a year, two of which you're wrong for, one you think you might want to do if you're real lucky. You can't possibly plot what's going to be available, what's going to be written, who's going to think of it, and if it will come to you or not. So thinking about what happened to the last film is not going to affect my choice next time, it really doesn't. I always think everything is going to be wildly successful no matter what. [Laughs] I didn't think Ironweed was going to break any box offices, but I knew it would have a life.
Q: Why is it actors never seem satisfied doing what they're really good at? Barbra Streisand excels in light comedies but prefers heavier drama; Al Pacino's strength is drama but he wants to do comedy...
A: He's right. He's very, very funny. American Buffalo was the perfect thing for him, that blend. He should do that as a film, he was so great. I saw him and Duvall do that--it was one of the best things I've ever seen. Ever. He's funny even in his most serious roles. He's always putting a twist on something. Look at Dog Day Afternoon. Fantastic. That's an actor's dream, to be able to find something where you get laughs and it's excruciatingly moving at the same time.
Q: What have you done like that?
A: Well, I thought that Sophie's Choice was kind of funny. Yeah, I did, in the lighter part of it. I've always liked to put a spin on a tragic thing, or find the pathos in a comedy. Postcards was the closest I came to finding a nice blend.
Q: What happened with Man Trouble? Didn't you and producer Bruce Gilbert go to see Pacino about doing it?
A: Yes. Al just didn't want to do it.
Q: Was it because he didn't think it was the man's picture?
A: [Laughs giddily] Oh God, wouldn't that be depressing if that was the reason?
Q: Isn't that sometimes what happens?
A: I don't think that was the reason. Because the part is pretty great. It's pretty equal. The woman has more problems but the man is the flashier character. Very funny character. Perfect for him.
Q: Laurence Olivier once said: "Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult."
A: I think that is something that men feel more than women. Because women don't have as much a problem revealing their emotions, which is what it is about most profoundly. [Pauses] That exhausted me, that answer. [Chuckles] But I think it is masochistic. Sometimes I look up and think that I'm putting myself through the meat grinder for the sixteenth take in an emotional scene, and it's a precarious land you inhabit where everything is real for you and yet if you peel back the scales from your eyes you'd see people smoking and yawning and asking when is lunch. And you have to create the emotional moment. And it is very masochistic. But it's very satisfying at the same time, because you exercise some major thing during the day that a lot of people who are looking at their watches or yawning don't. And that's great to flex your emotional muscle. It's a catharsis.
Q: I was watching you between takes this afternoon, how you sat perfectly still on the gurney for four hours.
A: I tried to keep my back straight, did you notice?
Q: It was more impressive than the work.
A: Stamina, that's the other thing. That's Olivier, too. He said that stamina is the major component in acting.
Q: Have you ever been in the middle of something where you realized it's a mistake?
A: Yes.
Q: But you wouldn't want to mention what?
A: [Laughs] Absolutely not!
Q: More than once?
A: Yes. More than twice!
Q: I must admit it's a bit disconcerting talking to you with that bulge on your neck. Every time you laugh I think your head might fall off. Is this the most extensive makeup you've had to endure?
A: Never so much and not every day, but I had a bigger makeup for Out of Africa, when I had to play an old woman with pouches and eye bags. That took about four hours.
Q: Did you like the way you looked as an old lady?
A: I looked like my dad, which was sort of a shock. Because I always thought that I would look like my grandmother.
Q: Was your father Jewish and your mother a Quaker?
A: [Laughs] No. Streep was a name taken by Jews in Holland in the fifteenth century. Then they came to this country and became all sorts of people. Some of them in Holland became Catholics, some of them stayed Jews, some became Protestants over the centuries. He was raised Episcopalian or Protestant when he was a child. My mother's father's family were Quakers. Her mother's family were Swiss/English. Wolf was her maiden name. Mother's name was McFadden, Irish.
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.