The essential Meryl Streep

MANILA, Philippines – When Meryl Streep showed up in this year’s Academy Awards night, there was a little gasp in the audience when it was announced that her role in Doubt (where she plays Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the strict head of a Bronx Catholic school who suspects that a new priest may be abusing one of her students) was her 15th academy awards nomination eclipsing the track record of Katherine Hepburn.

Hepburn was the same actress who beat Streep in the Oscar race of 1981 where the former won for a role in On Golden Pond and the later nominated for a leading role in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and lost.

As it is, Streep has the track record of being nominated for roles in The Deer Hunter (1978), Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979, a winner), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Sophie’s Choice (1982, a winner), Silkwood (1983), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Adaptation (2002), Music Of The Heart (1999), One True Thing (1998), The Bridges Of Madison County (1995), Postcards From The Edge (1990), A Cry In The Dark (1988), Ironweed (1987) and Out Of Africa (1985), among others.

In next year’s Oscar race, it is possible she will be cited again for her singing role in Mamma Mia.

How can this actress amass so much recognition and citations since her screen debut in 1978?

Part of the answer can be gleaned from a re-reading of her first biography, Meryl Streep: Reluctant Superstar written by entertainment columnist Diana Maychick.

In the book, the author makes much of the fact that Streep loathes fame and stardom and actually lived an ordinary life as lover, wife and mother.

But once she is in front of the camera, another Meryl Streep is born playing ordinary women and enigmatic heroines and peeling away their complexities “like the layers of an onion, until their hearts show.”

The secret of Streep’s acting arsenal the biographer summarizes thus: “In all her roles, Meryl forces emotion out of simple truth. She refuses, on the screen, to upstage reality.”

After analyzing what makes Streep stand out as an actress, Maychick chronicles her humble origins in Summit, New Jersey where she was born on June 22, 1949 to a pharmaceutical executive and a commercial artist.

The actress actually made her stage debut at age 12 singing Oh Holy Night in French in a school production. The good reception for which made her mother decide to let her pursue a career in opera. For four years, Streep took voice lessons from the eminent Estele Liebling who is also the teacher of Beverly Sills who sang at the Meralco Theater in 1979. Liebling was also the teacher of Filipina soprano Dalisay Aldaba who debuted in the New York City Opera in the late 1940s.

After four years, the aspiring prepubescent coloratura soprano quit the singing lessons and lived out a real life drama as cheerleader during her high school days at Bernardsville High in New Jersey.

She was a typical teenager with teenage crushes on boys and reads Seventeen and the New Yorker. According to the biographer, the actress admitted to reading only seven books during her high school years and made stage debut as Marian the librarian in The Music Man and later in Li’l Abner and Oklahoma.

After high school, she moved onto Vassar College which counts among its famous graduates Edna St. Vincent Millay and Mary McCarthy and its famous drop-outs Jane Fonda and Jackie Kennedy. This is the same school where she acted Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire and Miss Julie.

At Vassar, Streep was just the budding actress. She actually worked in all phases of theater — directing, stage managing, lighting, and sound. She designed costumes for the student production of John Steinbeck’s Camina Real. Soon, she began to fall in love with acting but admitted it was no way to make a living.

After college, she headed for Vermont where she joined the Green Mountain Guild which was bringing Shakespeare and Checkhov plays in colleges and ski resorts. In this first attempt at professional acting, she was earning $48 a week.

Before pursuing her master’s degree in drama, she worked as waitress in a local beanery in New Jersey to earn her tuition money. She couldn’t afford Juilliard which charges $50 entrance fee (more than what she earned in a week) and settled for Yale which charges only $15.

At Yale’s graduate school, she essayed the roles of Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Bertha, the high-strung daughter in Stringberg’s The Father; Alma in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke; and many others. Her New York debut was the part of the manager in Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1898 comedy Treelawny of the Wells. That debut was the time the theater world came to a halt.

Playing Izabella in the Shakespeare play Measure for Measure, Streep fell in love with the actor who played Angelo. He is no other than actor John Cazale (The Godfather, Godfather II and Dog Day Afternoon) with whom she will appear in Deer Hunter where she will get her first Oscar nomination in 1978.

Six months after Cazale’s death (he died of cancer), Streep was married to a sculptor, Donald Gummer with whom she now has a grown-up son and a daughter.

From 1978 to 2008, Streep was harvesting Oscar and Emmy awards and more nominations and awards outside of Hollywood.

The biography ends in her message to a graduating class in Vassar College where she recounted her struggles as an aspiring actress. She knew that the batch would ask her how tall Dustin Hoffman was and how it was to be kissed by Robert de Niro.

But then she emphasized the search for perfection was not over yet and she would not consider herself successful as she was still evolving as an actress.

The essential Meryl Streep comes through in this message to a graduating class. By her reckoning, her alma mater did prepare her for the investigation of her motives along the way, the process of making choices, and the struggle to maintain her integrity, such as it was, in a business that asked her to just strip it off.

She emphasized: “The choice between the devil and the dream comes up every day in little disguises. I am sure it comes up in every field of endeavor and every life. My advice is to look the dilemma in the face and decide what you can live with. If you can live with the devil, Vassar hasn’t sunk her teeth into your leg the way she did mine. I believe this attempt at excellence is what sustains the most well-lived and satisfying, successful lives.”