Meryl Streep captures the icy imperiousness of Margaret Thatcher in the new film The Iron Lady.
What do you do after turning yourself into Julia Child, a bold, occasionally bossy woman who changed the way people think about food? You turn yourself into Margaret Thatcher, of course, an even bolder and bossier one, who changed the way people think about Britain. This is what Meryl Streep does in The Iron Lady. In yet another of her miraculous impersonations, which has already been nominated for a Golden Globe award, she seems even more Thatcher-like than Thatcher, so that after the movie if you go back and look at photographs of Mrs. Thatcher in her prime, you can’t help feeling that they’re a little off. She no longer looks like herself.
When offered the role of Thatcher, Streep didn’t hesitate. “You have to imagine yourself as a 62-year-old actress getting a phone call asking you to play the first female leader in the Western world elected on her own merits and not on the coat tails of her husband,” she says. “To say, ‘No, I’m not interested’ would just be ridiculous. There is no other opportunity like it.”
Streep researched her part carefully enough to learn even what Thatcher carried in her handbag: 3-by-5 cards with adages by Kipling, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln and Disraeli. She also realised, she says, that Thatcher, who is now 86 and in ill health, was herself an impersonation of sorts, a woman who allowed herself to be made over by Tory strategists and even changed her way of speaking. In the movie Streep effortlessly imitates those burnished, sometimes strident, declamatory tones, the one that novelist Angela Carter once said were reminiscent “not of real toffs but of Wodehouse aunts.”
Phyllida Lloyd, the film’s director, says, “Meryl just has an ear. There’s a Margaret Thatcher voice that British impersonators — men in drag — like to do, and it’s a frightful parody. But nobody has really gone inside it the way Meryl has.”
Streep also captures Thatcher’s icy imperiousness, especially toward the end of her career, when she enjoyed humiliating her ministers, and even the hint of sexiness that kept so many of those ministers in thrall for so long. In one scene Streep is in an evening gown, having a button sewn on before an important Tory function, and when the seamstress is through she hoists her bosom, like Queen Boadicea putting on her breastplate, before going out to challenge a roomful of men.
But The Iron Lady is not, everyone involved keeps insisting, a conventional biopic, one that follows the career of some exalted personage step by step and ends with him or her in triumph. It’s not even an especially political film. The movie begins in the present, with the Thatcher character old and frail, a little dotty and paranoid, and hallucinating the presence of her dead husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent). She appears that way for almost half the film, revisiting her great days only in memory, so that The Iron Lady is a movie as much about decline as about a rise to power. The great events of Thatcher’s career — the miners’ strike, the Falklands war, her meetings with Brezhnev (who gave her the Iron Lady nickname) — are touched on only briefly and sketchily.
Streep says, “What interested me was the part of someone who does monstrous things maybe, or misguided things. Where do they come from? How do those formulations begin, how do they solidify, calcify, become deficits? How do a person’s strengths become weaknesses? Look at me. I tend to go on too long. I’m a little dogmatic, and that could get really awful over time. If you are self-aware, as actors are, you let these things go into your pores, including criticism. I hate being criticised.”
Lloyd says, “So did Margaret Thatcher. But that’s understandable. She couldn’t show weakness.” She adds: “In parts of England now it’s a transgression even to consider her as a human being. She’s that she-devil. For me the point of the film was to find the human side.”
The New York Times
