Are we there yet?

January 16-22, 2017

“Women are better at acting than men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing somebody bigger than you of something he doesn’t know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia. Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending or acting is a very valuable life skill, and we all do it. All the time.”

— Meryl Streep on acting.

I began watching the Golden Globes the other night and lasted until Billy Bob’s acceptance speech. I just don’t have a lot of patience for long acceptance speeches. That, and Jimmy Fallon was kind of off from the get go. So, as my snarkiness began increasing, KM and our daughter Alexis suggested that I check out the television upstairs, which I did. Alexis’ words to me as I walked up the stairs were, “It’s their one moment to be in the spotlight, dad.” She’s right, so I departed, putting everyone in a better mood.

It did cause me to miss the “overrated” Meryl Streep, however, and her comments. This would be the same Meryl Streep I guess, who has been nominated for an Academy Award 19 times, which is seven more than Jack Nicholson and Katherine Hepburn. She won three Oscars, which makes her, as someone may have already Tweeted out, “A 16-time looooser.”

In checking my facts (one of my 2017 goals is less fake news in this spot) I found some things I didn’t know about the 67-year old actress.

She grew up Catholic in Bernardsville, New Jersey, where Author Karina Longworth would later describe her as a “gawky kid with glasses and frizzy hair.”

But that must have changed because she would become a cheerleader at Bernard’s High School.

She was accepted to the MFA program at Yale School of Drama. And while there she supplemented her course fees by waitressing and typing. She appeared in over a dozen stage productions a year, to the point that she became overworked, developing ulcers. It got so bad that she contemplated quitting acting and switching to law.

Although she had not set out for a film career, Robert De Niro’s performance in Taxi Driver (1976) had a profound impact on young Streep, who said to herself, “that’s the kind of actor I want to be when I grow up.”

Streep’s first feature film role came opposite Jane Fonda in the 1977 film Julia, in which she had a small role during a flashback sequence.

“I thought, I’ve made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business.” However, she cites Fonda as having a lasting influence on her as an actress, and has credited her as “opening probably more doors than I probably even know about.”

De Niro, who had spotted Streep in her stage production of The Cherry Orchard, suggested that she play a role in the war film The Deer Hunter. She was married at that time to actor John Cazale, also in the film and who had been diagnosed with lung cancer; so Streep took on the role to be with her husband for the duration of filming. He died in 1978. Al Pacino later said, “I’ve hardly ever seen a person so devoted to someone who is falling away like John was. To see her in that act of love for this man was overwhelming.”

As for me, I first fell for her back in 1978, in the miniseries, The Holocaust. Now, almost 40 years later, she’s ridden that overrated thing into a pretty decent career.

Jay Edwards is publisher of the Daily Record. Contact him at jedwards@dailydata.com.