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Meryl Streep probably will win a Golden Globe on Monday night for her performance in “The Devil Wears Prada.” It helps that she’s in the musical/comedy category, safely outside the big shadow cast by Helen Mirren and “The Queen” in the dramatic category.
Whereas a win will be noteworthy, the nomination isn’t. Streep, 57, has been up for a Globe more years than not since her first nod, for the 1978 film “The Deer Hunter.” At the Oscars, she tops everyone, with 13 total nominations.
She is, after all, Meryl Streep, and people have been saying of lesser actresses, “She’s no Meryl Streep,” since Streep herself was in her early 30s.
But instead of taking her greatness as a given, like paved roads or cellular phone service, let’s step back for a moment to celebrate it. Now is the time to do it, during this brief lull before Mirren and “Dreamgirls” breakout Jennifer Hudson dominate awards-season talk about female performances.
Three decades into her film career, Streep has emerged as a late-blooming America’s Sweetheart, lauded and liked in equal measure. That she’s won only two Oscars (best actress, for “Sophie’s Choice” and supporting actress, for “Kramer vs. Kramer”) is the Academy’s shame, not ours.
Her fame has outlasted that of her peers from the 1980s - Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek and Glenn Close - in visibility and relevance. Those other actresses still work, but their careers as leading ladies had shelf lives, like the careers of most women in Hollywood.
Streep took longer than most big Hollywood stars to mature. Not as an actress, since she was exemplary out of the gate, but as a movie star, which is an entirely different thing. She impressed filmgoers before ingratiating herself to them.
Though she’s an American treasure (and the only American in the likely best-actress Oscar field - Mirren in “The Queen,” Judi Dench in “Notes on a Scandal,” Penelope Cruz in “Volver” and Kate Winslet in “Little Children”), Streep’s initial approach was almost European in its lack of regard for whether viewers loved her or not.
Her decided tragedian bent, combined with her cool beauty and technical skill so acute it was almost spooky, kept the broader audience at a distance. An appreciative distance, but a distance nonetheless.
It was also the roles. Bucking the Hollywood rule that an actress assume “mother” roles only after exhausting ingenue possibilities, Streep played mothers quite young, including some of the most challenging mother roles of all time.
In “Kramer,” her character dared leave her adorable, mop-topped son in his father’s care, only to return to reclaim the child once she got her head together. Though her performance provoked a degree of empathy among 1970s mothers questioning a traditional domestic path, her character was still the movie’s villain.
The decision foisted upon concentration-camp prisoner Sophie in “Sophie’s Choice” was agonizing for mothers and every other viewer, and Streep’s performance ranks among the greatest in screen history. But by 1988’s “A Cry in the Dark,” the heaviness of Streep’s roles, maternal and otherwise, had grown wearying. Taken together, they were too tragic, too impeccably accented, too much.
But with the start of the 1990s came Streep’s watershed moment of accessibility. In “Postcards From the Edge,” she played a version of author-actress Carrie Fisher, a role that was so wrong, in terms of looks and manner, yet ultimately so right.
In exploring her character’s issues with men, her mother and substance abuse, Streep, the thespian’s thespian, dared to play an actress whose career was lacking. Streep ably adopted Fisher’s dry delivery style, and also impressed with her singing talent during a country number.
The mid-1990s brought the rise of the independent film movement and a thousand chances for Streep to mine new veins of tragedy in fledgling directors’ $500,000 gritty dramas. Instead, she made “A River Wild” and “The Bridges of Madison County.”
These gigs brought hearty paychecks, certainly, but also represented Streep’s gift to the broader movie-going public. Instead of stretching her acting muscles doing Chekhov and Eugene O’Neill on stage, she built her actual muscles, so could be chased down a river by Kevin Bacon.
Her irresistible turn as an Italian Iowan farm wife in “Madison County” helped transform a hokey book into an intensely moving film. Streep’s Midwest-Mediterranean accent was her most impressive to date, and she exuded more womanly warmth than she had before.
The New Jersey native and longtime New Yorker shows a special affinity for Heartland roles. Think of her work as Oklahoman Karen Silkwood (the fun-loving part, not the sad part), or Wisconsinite Yolanda in “A Prairie Home Companion,” Robert Altman’s final film. Not only did Streep master the loose-limbed Altman style, but she sang even better than she did in “Postcards.”
Over the past few years, she has perfected her comic timing. In the underrated “Prime,” in which she played a therapist whose son is dating a client, she delivered a comic performance worthy of Diane Keaton, one of the few actresses in Streep’s age range still working regularly in big Hollywood films.
Streep incorporates drama into her comedy and vice versa. Her scary political mother in “The Manchurian Candidate” remake riveted because Streep infused her with humor. Streep ran away with “The Devil Wears Prada” by playing it straight.
In making a comedy without obviously playing for laughs, her performance as fashion editor Miranda Priestly shares traits with Bette Davis’ work as Margo Channing in “All About Eve.” Highly successful women forced to constantly look over their shoulders, Miranda and Margo both cut to the quick with withering comments.
Linking Davis, considered America’s best film actress, and Streep, its greatest living actress, on a small scale begs comparison on a larger scale. Some would call it apples and oranges, since Davis emerged in an era when stars were always to some degree themselves and Streep at a time that favored a more immersive approach.
But one cannot discount the idea that Streep is the greatest American film actress just because she’s modern and still living. Though Davis was the more electrifying screen presence, Streep’s body of work is extraordinary.
Because film acting is still a relatively new craft, it might take another 50 years to adequately assess the impact of these actresses. And some would argue that Katharine Hepburn trumps them both.
But for versatility, you have to hand it to Streep. Neither Davis nor Hepburn could sing worth a lick.
