When Meryl Streep was 10, she took her mother’s eyebrow pencil and drew lines on her face, wrapped a shawl around her head, and made her mother take a picture. It was an attempt to look like, and better understand, her beloved grandmother. As a child, she’d always felt older than her years. She has the photograph to this day.
It is this empathy for elderly women – their secret lost lives and heavy limbs – that fuels her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, the controversial movie about the former British prime minister, which opens in Canada on Friday. Half of the movie is set in the present, with Baroness Thatcher, suffering from dementia, haunted by visions of her late husband Denis. A woman who once had the world as her stage, who was hailed as a warrior and vilified as a dragon who laid waste to her country, is essentially imprisoned by infirmity in her London apartment.
“A biopic made about Margaret Thatcher by a male director might consider other things,” says Streep, and she says “biopic” in the way that a vegan might say “hamburger.” “We were interested in the old lady.’’
The “we” she’s referring to are the three women at the heart of the film: Streep herself, director Phyllida Lloyd, and screenwriter Abi Morgan, a trio of feminists who have made a movie about a woman who scorned feminism (more on that later).
It is a movie that perhaps could only have been made by women, because it values the personal equally with the political: The poll tax riots and the miners’ strikes are there, but so is Thatcher’s strained relationship with her children, and her brisk, fond exasperation with Denis’s attempts to cook. It is a sympathetic portrayal of the lioness in winter, and a film that has achieved the remarkable feat – even before opening – of infuriating both Lady Thatcher’s friends and foes.
Streep had been looking around for a project that examined “the end of things” when she got the call about The Iron Lady. To look at the 62-year-old actress sitting in a London hotel suite, her face unlined and blonde hair sweeping her shoulders, liberated from the prosthetic buck teeth and tissue of wrinkles that turned her into Thatcher, it’s hard to imagine that she’s near the end of anything. (If you listen to Hollywood soothsayers, the one thing she’s close to is a third Oscar.)
Thatcher’s cantankerous old cabinet colleague Norman Tebbit has disdained the performance as “half-hysterical, overemotional, overacting,” but he’s in a minority. Even the British commentators who didn’t like the film – and there are many – admit that Streep’s portrayal of the grocer’s ambitious daughter is uncanny.
The film’s producer, Damian Jones, wanted Streep to play Thatcher as soon as he saw her as the tyrannical magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada. Her friend Phyllida Lloyd, who had directed her so successfully in Mamma Mia!, had a moment’s hesitation: “Only,” says the director, “because I thought, ‘Am I ready to take on two controversies, first Margaret Thatcher and then an American actress playing her?’ ” The doubt was fleeting. On Christmas Eve, 2010, Lloyd was walking through Selfridges department store when she received a message from Streep: The actress had recorded a famous harangue that Thatcher delivered to interviewer Robin Day. “It was this six-minute, blustery aria, perfectly delivered,” says Lloyd. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
