Fear of Another Tongue-Lashing

Some would say it’s ironic that two-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep is frequently criticized for excelling at one of the hardest tasks for any actor, which is to master a range of dialects and foreign accents.

Asked about this, Streep says she also finds it ironic and admits such criticism has stung her. In “The Bridges of Madison County,” set in 1965, she plays a woman born in Italy who migrated to the United States with an American GI after World War II and has spent 20 years in Iowa. Preparing for the role, she discovered that her co-star and director Clint Eastwood had also been influenced by the critics.

“I’m afraid to look at anything now that isn’t a woman who lives in a small town in New England,” Streep says, describing herself. “It has muted my appetite to exercise my imagination. I wish I were thicker-skinned, but it does affect me, that criticism. So I have tried not to do some things. I remember when I got the script for ‘Out of Africa,’ I thought, ‘Oh, man, oh, man, it’s such a great part, but she’s . . . Danish ! I can’t! But, what, I’m going to turn this down?’

“So I did it. But I thought a long time about it. And the same thing with this. I thought, well, maybe there’s more Iowa than Italy here. But I grew up in New Jersey two houses down from a lady who was a war bride and had come to this country [from Italy] exactly when Francesca did and I knew her and her kids played with me and my brothers, and I talk [in the film] how she talks.

“I was ready for that and I came to Iowa and met Clint the night before we started shooting at the cast and crew get-together. He waltzed in about 10. We’d all been there since 7. I was very nervous to meet him in real life and then go shoot the next day. And maybe the second thing he said to me was, ‘I hope you’re not going to do any big accents.’ And I was just defoliated by that. I think he was afraid that I’d come in like, I don’t know, Lucy in a skit or something. I fretted about it all night and then came on the set and just did what I was going to do anyway. And he never said anything about it.”