THE MERYL/MAGGIE DILEMMA
On May 3rd 1979, two months before my 14th birthday, I switched on the news. Hemmed by reporters, a smallish blonde woman called Mrs Thatcher was promising Britain, with uplifted eyes, to bring “hope where there was despair”. Something fake in the timbre of her voice irritated me; what she was saying irritated me even more—quoting Francis of Assisi, aligning herself with the saints before she’d even started. It was the first twinge of what was to become a lifelong, instinctive and visceral aversion. By the time I got to voting age, I was sick of hearing François Mitterrand’s description of her as having “the eyes of Caligula, the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”. I thought she had the eyes of Caligula, the mouth of Caligula, and quite a few of his other attributes too.
But 1979 was also the year that Meryl Streep won her first Oscar—for “Kramer v Kramer”—and for every atom of my teenage being that loathed Mrs T there were two that lionised Streep. I had hopes of being an actress, and she was the colossus of the profession. In “The Deer Hunter”, “Sophie’s Choice”, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, she created a new way of being on film, one quieter, yet more demanding of the watcher, than anything before. She had a knack for creating characters of impenetrable surface, a cliff-face men threw themselves at. Or off.
So the film “The Iron Lady” left me in a quandary. The idea of watching someone I loved, if that isn’t too strong a word, playing someone I despised—and that is the word—was unsettling. I had flinched from the huge headshot posters of Streep-as-Thatch: that sincere tilt of the head, the mad wideness of the eyes, the I-might-just-bite-you protuberant top teeth…it was horribly familiar, like a haunting.
In the end, I managed to sit through it without shouting or throwing things at the screen—but only because the strength of Streep’s performance lies not in her impersonation of a prime minister in her pomp, but in the tenderness and accuracy with which she outlines the frailties of her old age. I suspect Streep couldn’t quite bring herself to be as unremittingly self-righteous as the real thing—there are a couple of scenes where she can’t resist giving Mrs Thatcher the politician a wholly unbelievable, public catch in the throat, a glisten of sympathy in the eye. But her old, afflicted Lady Thatcher is only too real: she slides her gaze away when confronted with a gap in her memory; she alternately stabs at, or is kind to, poor Carol; her arm trembles with effort as she lowers herself into bed. There were moments when I even felt sorry for That Woman. Now that is worth an Oscar.
"The Iron Lady" is on general release from today
Isabel Lloyd is deputy editor of Intelligent Life
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quote It's often seemed to me that Shakespeare might well have been a simply brilliant editor as well as a beyond-extraordinary writer