During her career American film star Meryl Streep has become famous for her ability to imitate a broad range of accents. And her role as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady is no exception.
The film is directed by Phyllida Lloyd, who also worked with Streep in Mamma Mia! And the supporting cast is impressive. Jim Broadbent plays Denis Thatcher and Richard E Grant is the Conservative politician Michael Heseltine, while the young Margaret Thatcher is played by Alexandra Roach.
The producers admit that it was difficult to find financial backers for the film, but Meryl Streep says she didn’t hesitate when she was offered the title role:
Meryl Streep (Standard American accent): When Phyllida came and said “I have a... a film that circles Margaret Thatcher’s life and issues around a woman leader like that” I was already, immediately, of course, interested because there aren’t very many woman leaders! There aren’t film-makers who are interested in investigating what it meant to be a woman leader, and so I was really, really interested.
shakespEarean
Yet the film is not a documentary about Thatcher so much as a human drama:
Meryl Streep: One thing you really do come away with, in appreciation with, after playing a character of sort of Shakespearean proportions, is you have… you... I feel very humble and daunted by the prospect of what she really took on her shoulders. It’s an enormous, terrifying, devastating position, to be consigning people to life or death, and then to put your head on the pillow at night. People think, you know, there is no toll, and we do look at public figures as if they’re monsters or gods, and, you know, the truth is everybody falls sort of in the middle.
Margaret Thatcher was a controversial political figure, but The Iron Lady is a non-political film:
Meryl Streep: Well, I didn’t come into the film with a political agenda about Margaret Thatcher. I honestly knew shockingly little about her policies! I knew that they were in line with many of President Reagan’s policies, with which I was more familiar. We were sort of more concerned with the toll that takes on a person, that kind of decision-making, when you’re the leader and the buck stops here. What does it do to you as a human and how much stamina does it take to stay strong?
a man’s world
Both as a woman and an American, Meryl Streep says that she initially felt like an outsider:
Meryl Streep: For me, as an actor, just walking into the first day of rehearsal was incredibly daunting because there were all these wonderful British actors and I think there were about 40 or 45 of them and I was the only woman in the room. And I sort of had the feeling Margaret Thatcher must have had when she walked into the... Conservative Party! All those gents were so great to me and welcoming in this territory where I really don’t belong, as the interloper, or the American, but in a way I had courage to play Margaret Thatcher because she was an interloper in this Oxbridge Etonian Conservative Party, into which she marched undaunted and I thought, “Well, if she can do it, I can do it!”
THE BIG PICTURE
Yet she enjoyed the biographical aspect:
Meryl Streep: The best part of making the picture was really the opportunity to look at a whole life because, at this point in my life, you do look back and you think about the whole history. Sometimes it’s overwhelming how big a life can be, how crammed with events that seem momentous at the time. It was an interesting thing to follow a woman who grew up during the war, and follow that through the post-war time in Britain, and time of privation and rebuilding, and to see someone put together their own philosophy and put it into action, into practical solutions for what she saw as the deficits in her country’s economic well-being.
The Real Thatcher
People either love Margaret Thatcher or they hate her, but even her enemies admit she was a key figure in British and world history. Margaret Roberts was born in Grantham in 1925 and her background was modest: her father was a grocer. In spite of this she studied chemistry at Oxford and married Denis Thatcher, a businessman (with whom she had two children). She became a Conservative MP in 1959 and, after serving as a minister under Edward Heath, became leader of the party in 1975. She was elected Prime Minister in 1979 and resigned in 1990. She and her friend Ronald Reagan began a conservative, free-market revolution. She is also remembered for defeating Argentina in the Falklands War of 1982.