In Step With the Team

For almost two decades now, Meryl Streep has been the dominant female presence in almost every film in which she has appeared. She assumes starring roles as if to the manner born; it’s hard to recall a time when she was anything but a lead actress.

Back in the 1970s, of course, it wasn’t so. Streep spent three years at the Yale School of Drama and appeared onstage in Shakespeare, Shaw and Tennessee Williams--and not always in lead roles. After graduating, she enjoyed a spell with Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York City. She learned her craft, then, in the democratic, anti-star system of a stage background.

So there’s a case for claiming that she is returning to her roots in her new film “Dancing at Lughnasa.” In this story, set in Ireland, there is no single starring role, but five female parts of virtually equal prominence.

Streep, 49, pondered long and hard about the status conferred by different acting roles the morning after the world premiere of “Dancing at Lughnasa” at a Dublin movie theater, followed by a black-tie charity dinner for 300 guests at the Irish capital’s historic castle.

She looked in fine spirits, as well she might: After a slight downturn, her career is on the upswing. Streep recently starred in the sophisticated weepie “One True Thing” as a mother dying of a terminal illness; critics and audiences have enthused, and Oscar talk is in the air.

And now comes “Dancing at Lughnasa,” the stage play by the great Irish dramatist Brian Friel, adapted for film by another Irish playwright, Frank McGuinness (“Someone to Watch Over Me”). It is about the five Mundy sisters, spinsters eking out a poor living in a cottage near the Donegal village of Ballybeg in the 1930s.

Only the stern, proper teacher Kate (Streep) has the education to hold down a true job. Agnes (Brid Brennan) and simple-minded Rose (Sophie Thompson) earn a few pennies knitting gloves. The beauty among them, Christina (Catherine McCormack), has a young son born out of wedlock; cheerful, bawdy Maggie (Kathy Burke) scrapes to keep the household together. To cap their troubles, their beloved brother, Jack (Michael Gambon), a priest, has returned from missionary duties in Africa muddled and full of doubts about his Catholic faith.

Clearly, then, the independently financed “Dancing at Lughnasa” is an ensemble piece. It is also a relatively cheap film--less than $11 million, according to its Irish-born director, Pat O’Connor. O’Connor felt Streep would have to be wooed for the part, for she would receive far less than her normal fee. After she responded warmly to McGuinness’ script, O’Connor sent her speech tapes of ordinary Donegal people, and CDs of Irish traditional music. “I know she gets interested in that stuff,” he said. “She looks for something to stimulate her in a role.” It worked.

O’Connor wanted to start rehearsals on a Monday, and Streep flew into Donegal from the States only the day before. “I thought, ‘Here we go, it’ll be a Tuesday start now,’ ” he recalled. “Meryl got two hours’ sleep, but come Monday morning she was first to arrive, and extremely well prepared.”

In fact, it was the ensemble nature of the work that persuaded Streep to take the part. “I was interested to see if I could sweep in like this big American star and fit my huge, ungainly presence into an ensemble,” she said wryly. “Would the other actors accept me? But, of course, it was the easiest thing in the world. Other actors know you have to get rid of all that baggage. It was like coming home. They were divine to me.” The collegial work on “Dancing at Lughnasa,” she said, recalled her days as a stage actress.

So why hasn’t she done this kind of work more often? One assumes she has the pick of film roles for women her age. Maybe she does, but her strong sense of family imposes its own restrictions. She has been married to sculptor Don Gummer for 20 years, and their children--Henry, Mamie, Grace and Louisa, now 18, 14, 11 and 6--take precedence over her career.

“I haven’t worked in theater for 17 years,” she noted. “And that’s entirely because I have four children and can’t be gone every night and all weekend. That’s when they are home.”

Her last play was another ensemble piece: “Taken in Marriage,” at the Public Theater. “It lasted five weeks and it was fun, but I had an 18-month-old son, and we had two shows Saturday and two on Sundays. I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to have to give this a rest for a while.’ And then I never imagined I’d have so many children.” A wintry smile. “Oh yes, everything is so finely calculated!”

Films offered an answer; they paid better than theater, the work was in short bursts and it was easy for Streep to take her children with her to film sets. The next few years were the zenith of her career, and great roles came thick and fast: the tainted Victorian English mistress in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981); the Polish-Catholic woman haunted by chilling memories of Nazi atrocities in “Sophie’s Choice” (1982); Karen Silkwood, the bad-girl union activist at an Oklahoma nuclear plant (“Silkwood,” 1883); Isak Dinesen, the highly strung Danish baroness stuck on a Kenyan plantation in “Out of Africa” (1985); a skid row drunk in “Ironweed” (1987); and Lindy Chamberlain, the forbidding Australian mother falsely accused of murdering her baby in “A Cry in the Dark” (1988).

No actress in film history has played a broader range of lead roles, and Streep became the class act of the 1980s. She suffered a backlash from a coterie of critics led by Pauline Kael, who complained Streep acted only from the neck up. She was all technique, non-admirers sniped; she fell back too readily on her extraordinary range of accents. Yet she could rely on the continued adulation of her peers; between 1979 and 1991, she received an Oscar nomination an astounding nine times.

A turning point came eight years ago, when she and her family were in Los Angeles. Streep was making “Postcards From the Edge,” a film adapted from Carrie Fisher’s novel, playing a starlet beset by drug problems and an overbearing lush of a mother. It suddenly became clear that the movie schedules were taking a toll on her family.

Henry, then age 10, protested he didn’t want to move around anymore: “He was sick of being the new kid,” Streep recalled. “And he had a point. By then, he had been in preschool in New York, nursery school in Texas, kindergarten in London, first grade in Africa, second grade in Australia and third grade in Connecticut.

“So we told him OK. Don and I had a big discussion about it and decided it was too hard on him. We stayed living in Los Angeles through the school year, and I took jobs based around there so I could be home by 6 p.m.” They had kept their house in Connecticut and returned there each summer; they still live there.

The family stayed in Los Angeles for four years; and it is clear from studying Streep’s filmography the exact point at which Henry made his protest. Professionally, the 1990s have been harder for Streep; she has taken roles in flimsy comedies (“Death Becomes Her,” “Defending Your Life”) and notable flops (“The House of the Spirits,” “Marvin’s Room”).

At the same time, family logistics ruled her out of choice parts she might have relished. For instance, she was not prepared to spend a year traipsing around Argentina and Hungary to play Evita--though she later joked of Madonna, who landed the role: “I could rip her throat out.” (Streep replaced Madonna in the lead role in the upcoming film “50 Violins,” to be directed by Wes Craven, when Madonna left the project).

Now she works summers, if she can convince any of her family to accompany her on location; or she confines herself to films being shot in and around New York.

She admits she no longer feels in sync with what people like in movies. She noted, with one eyebrow arched, that “One True Thing” grossed $6.6 million on its opening weekend--”it did very well considering it’s about someone dying of cancer”--but the same weekend Jackie Chan’s “Rush Hour” opened with $31 million. “Unbelievable, isn’t it?” she said lightly.

“A lot of scripts get sent which my agents no longer even pass on to me. They’re so used to me saying, ‘Why do you send me this s---? You know I’m going to give it to the kids to do their crayoning on.’

“Then something comes along that feels and reads like a movie but has language that’s elegantly and evocatively written. It’s not just ‘what you see is what you get’; there’s a world underneath that an actor can discover. That’s what I saw in ‘Dancing at Lughnasa.’ These people exist on the plane of what they say, yet underneath, all their worlds are shifting.”

It’s now possible Streep could be back at the Oscars next year in two capacities; nominated as best actress for “One True Thing” and as supporting actress for “Dancing at Lughnasa.” Yet after such a vintage year, she still feels an acute shortage of good roles for actresses: “Not just my age, but any age. Younger actresses are just asked to be girls in the movies--sexy, fashionable, appealing--in a quirky kind of way, but don’t give any more than that. That’s what my friends in the 25-35 age range complain about--dopey roles.”

Of all film actors, Streep’s technique is the most widely dissected. Even ordinary moviegoers have strong opinions about her facility with accents: Is it brilliance or an annoying distraction?

“People don’t mention it about Anjelica Huston or Glenn Close or Susan Sarandon because they mention it about me,” she said. “I take it for everyone else. I’m the one with the tin cans attached to my car. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s easier to talk about than anything else about me.

“I think secretly people don’t like acting. They don’t like knowing it exists. They don’t want to know Santa Claus is your dad. They don’t want to see it’s not real.”

Whatever most people think of acting, few deny she’s hugely accomplished at it herself. Pat O’Connor deems her better now than in the ‘80s, when she was stacking up Oscar nominations annually: “She’s sophisticated, intelligent, and now she brings all her experience to bear on her work.”

So what happens in 10 years’ time, when the kids have finally flown the nest? “ “I don’t look ahead in that way. But I’m already so tired I can’t imagine, say, directing at that stage. The hours are so long. Essentially, you put everyone on set to bed, then get them up again.” She considers this a moment. “It sounds like parenting.”