Apparently, even Meryl Streep’s “it” has homework.
From Sophie’s Polish-inflected English in Sophie’s Choice to Margaret Thatcher’s distinctive voice in The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep makes transformation look effortless. The preparation tells a different—and rather useful—story.
The date above marks Streep’s Academy Award for The Iron Lady. This retrospective includes photographs from different stages of her career, each dated in its caption.
On February 26, 2012, Meryl Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. It was recognition for a whole performance: a voice, a physical presence, and a person’s inner life brought together on screen.
Nearly three decades earlier, on April 11, 1983, she had won the same category for Sophie’s Choice. She portrayed Sophie Zawistowska, a fictional Polish survivor of Auschwitz. The film’s subject demands seriousness and care; the character’s voice is part of a performance carrying profound trauma.
The American Film Institute records that Streep spent months studying Polish and maintained Sophie’s accent both on and off camera during filming. That kind of preparation helps explain the illusion of ease. Apparently, the homework did not disappear just because someone called “cut.”
For The Iron Lady, Streep told Terry Gross in a February 2012 Fresh Air interview that she listened to public recordings of Thatcher at different stages of her life. She paid attention to the emphasis of words, the shape of sentences, and the breath that carried them. Following a recorded voice was one way into the role.
She then connected speech with posture, movement, and the convictions driving the person. She also drew on breathing techniques learned through singing. Her account makes the process tangible: listen, observe, and bring the details together into a character, rather than treating an accent as an isolated party trick.
Our take: some people have a remarkable gift. What makes this story useful to the rest of us is the work she gives that gift. Listen closely. Try again. Notice one more detail. Apparently, even brilliance has a homework folder—and “not yet” is a perfectly reasonable first rehearsal.
Read the primary source: Meryl Streep’s Fresh Air interview — February 6, 2012 ↗
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