Film Spotlight

By Cath Clarke

She's been nominated for more Oscars than any other actress, starred in some classics and the odd clanger, we weigh up the legend that is Meryl Streep

Early in her career, Meryl Streep received a letter from Bette Davis saying that she would eventually be Davis's successor to the title of best actress of her generation. America's Greatest Living Actress: it ought to be put in capitals or trademarked, an unassailable postscript that follows the name Meryl Streep whenever it appears in print

In the past she likened that reputation to a gorilla that arrives in the room before her. But in the last few years Streep has been frog-marching the gorilla out the door. Those meaty roles are still there; this week she was nominated for her fifteenth Oscar for Sister Aloysius, a nun in John Patrick Shanley's 'Doubt'. But some of her recent film choices raised eyebrows for being a bit, well, lowbrow. For a start, what on earth was a distinguished actor of her calibre doing in the chick flick 'The Devil Wears Prada'? Or high-kicking on a bed and belting out Abba numbers in 'Mamma Mia!'? If badly performed, those roles might have spelled professional suicide, but Streep doesn't do bad performance. Instead she turns 60 this year on the top of her game. In interviews for ‘Mamma Mia!’ last year she came across as positively serene, and dare it be said, like a woman up for a bit of a laugh. It is as if someone has hit the refresh button on her career.

Set in the Bronx in 1964, 'Doubt' is one of Streep's top-drawer performances. She is the mother superior of a Catholic school who suspects the parish priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of sexually abusing its only black pupil. Another actress might have hammed it up as this hard-as-nails nun who rules her school with an iron rod. The camera has never been so severe on Streep, eyes tired, blond hair hidden behind a black bonnet. But with her customary ease, she keeps out of caricature, showing us a flicker of the life behind this woman, eliciting sympathy for her righteous holy war on modern life. As in some of Streep's best roles, Sister Aloysius is out of step with her times and up against a patriarchy - here it's the Catholic Church. Under its authority a priest, no matter how affable or liberal-seeming, will always relegate her to second-class.

Whether Streep can beat the Kate Winslet show at the Oscars this year, we'll have to wait until February to find out. In London last week she refused to be baited on awards, calling them a 'horse race'. Nevertheless her own stockpile of Oscar nominations makes for interesting number crunching. She had two wins in quick succession in the early 1980’s for 'Kramer vs. Kramer' and 'Sophie's Choice'. But she has been nominated fifteen times, which makes her the most nominated actress of all time, and, as she once said, the actress who has lost most times.

Raised in New Jersey, Streep got a scholarship to Yale Drama School, where she was in a class with Sigourney Weaver. Little wonder that the tag of America's Greatest Living Actress stuck when you consider her rush of films early on in her career. Her first Oscar nomination came in 1979 for 'The Deer Hunter' (1978), only her second ever film. It was a small role but in it you can already see the weight she brings to her characters. It's there in the scene where her stumbling drunken father slaps her across the face as she is just about to leave her friends' wedding, wearing a bridesmaid's dress. Just one gesture – the way she moves her jaw around after the slap, her familiarity with the movement, testing to see if it's broken – says everything you need to know about her life in this shabby house.

In 1980 'Kramer vs Kramer' gave Streep her first win, for best supporting actress. She was 29 when she was cast as a Manhattan housewife who abandons her husband and son. Some of her best parts over the years have been women frustrated by their lives, here and in 'Bridges over Madison County' when she played an ignored and isolated Italian woman living in rural Iowa. Streep had been up for a smaller part in 'Kramer vs Kramer' but it was suggested she try out for the bigger role. Later, she admitted that it was generally thought she was in 'the right place to play an emotionally disturbed woman'. In real life she had just nursed her fiancée John Cazale until his death from cancer. Cazale had appeared with her, already ill, in 'The Deer Hunter' and played feckless Fredo in 'The Godfather'. She won her second Oscar just two years later, this time for her leading role in 'Sophie's Choice'.

With a nod in 2003 for 'Adaptation' Streep overtook Katharine Hepburn as the most nominated actress. She seems much too polite to crow, but the milestone must have been noted with a smile. Hepburn was famously not a fan and in conversation with her biographer tapped the side of her head when Streep's name was mentioned, saying 'click, click, click' – meaning you could see the cogs when she was acting. Hepburn might have been in the minority, but she is not alone in her criticism. Streep's acting has sometimes been described as chilly, and the critic Pauline Kael wrote that she only acted from 'the neck up'.

Looking through the list of Streep's nominations over the years, many of them are memorable for the performance rather than the films themselves. Remember 'Ironweed' or 'Postcards from the Edge'? After 'A Cry In The Dark' (1988) she had a generation of kids running around the playground crying, 'A dingo stole my baby!' in accents they'd learnt off 'Neighbours'. She hit a patch of lousy comedies in the late 80’s and early 90’s, though later defended the much maligned 'Death Becomes Her' (1992): 'I thought it was a comedy with a very sharp point about how actresses in Los Angeles deal with ageing, and I liked it.' She has been vocal about the lack of opportunities for women, although has rather neatly side-stepped that particular frustration herself. In her 50’s she has played a sceptical reporter in Robert Redford's 'Lions for Lambs', a New Yorker journalist in Spike Jonze's 'Adaptation', appeared in 'The Manchurian Candidate ' and 'The Hours'.

As for Streep, the words that are used most often in interviews are 'unfussy' and 'ordinary'. In her personal life she has been married for 30 years to the sculptor Don Gummer and has four kids. Professionally, if there was a thought that she was getting a little too eminent or untouchable, that all changed when she did the splits mid-air in a pair of dungarees. And whatever you think of 'Mamma Mia!', it has pulled in $600 million (£402million) worldwide so far. 'We made it to be contended with - loved or hated - not to be ranked,' says Streep.

Still, come Oscars night, there she will sit, being rated, for the fifteenth time, Meryl Streep, America's Greatest Living Actress.