With an Accent on Conditioning

Let’s say you’re a 45-year-old mother of four--an actress renowned for your range of accents, not for your muscle tone--and asked to helm a raft through treacherous white-water rapids, and make it look real. You only have a few months to prepare.

Who’re you gonna call?

If you’re Meryl Streep, set to star in your first action film, “The River Wild,” you call the personal fitness duo of Kimberley Dashiell Silver and Mark Silver of Triangle Studio in Santa Monica. Known for low-key, confidential personal workouts, the Silvers beat out a town full of celebrity trainers to give Streep the strength she’d need for her role on the rapids.

“We groomed her like an athlete for an athletic event,” says Mark Silver of the work he and his wife did with Streep six days a week, three hours a day for four months, a regimen the Silvers usually discourage.

“Meryl’s a woman who has never done anything physical like this before,” adds Kimberley. “She’s never really shown her body much on screen and she had to be in prime condition to control the raft, to physically handle the demands of the role and not hurt herself.”

While one of the fruits of Streep’s labor, Kimberley concedes, was that she “ended up looking great,” Streep’s appearance was a secondary concern.

“Meryl didn’t have to stand there and hold a gun and look buff,” Mark says. “She had to prepare for a role that demanded strength.”

Streep agreed. “Kimberley and Mark knew that I didn’t want to look gym-ized,” Streep says. “I wanted to look like a mother who did this, but I wanted to be strong enough to be able to handle whatever came my way.”

Achieving that strength meant beginning her workout at 5:30 a.m. (an hour Streep chose so she could be back home in time to take her kids to school), working out for an hour and a half with Mark on weight training and aerobics. “I never had to motivate her,” says Mark of the pre-dawn workout time. “We worked on her overall body strength, focusing on her upper back because of the rowing and sculling she had to do. I wanted her to have a workout that would translate to her life for the next four months while she was on the river.”

Once her children were off to school, Streep would return to the studio to work with Kimberley on stretching and strenuous yoga. The yoga, Kimberley says, gave Streep a calmness and courage to work on the water by helping her stay focused.

“She had to be a believer,” Kimberley says. “Sometimes she was exhausted and unsure, asking, ‘Can I really do this?’ But Meryl’s a really powerful person--she’d just grunt, sweat, get quiet and do it.”

Mark admits that he cried when he saw the film because “Meryl got what she wanted,” but says he’s proudest of the fact that Streep never got hurt while working on the river. “The fact that she never missed a day of shooting because her back hurt shows how well we trained her--and how strong her will is,” he says.