If you need your faith in Hollywood restored, check out what Meryl Streep's been up to lately.
At a time when most over-40 actresses are banished from the screen or stuck playing thankless mother roles, the 59-year-old Streep keeps defying the odds. Think of her career as a Molotov cocktail aimed at the nearest glass ceiling.
Now, hot on the heels of the monster hit Mamma Mia, comes Doubt, an adaptation of John Patrick Shanley's Tony-winning play about a by-the-books nun named Sister Aloysius (Streep) who suspects a popular priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of molesting an altar boy.
It's a tough little film that gives Streep, Hoffman and costars Amy Adams and Viola Davis plenty of opportunities to set off the emotional fireworks. (Doubt opens Christmas Day in Tampa Bay.)
"There's a power in the movie that comes from a kind of paring away of everything except the encounter between human beings," notes Streep of the film. "It's like a Van Dyke painting. Put everyone in black and just take everything away but the light and the faces and the hands."
If Streep nabs an Oscar nomination for her performance, it will be a record-breaking 15th nod, the most for any actor in Hollywood history. (She is up for two Golden Globes this year, with nominations both for Doubt and Mamma Mia.) She's already taken home two Academy Awards for Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie's Choice but, she says, a third golden boy would be much appreciated.
"I don't' get tired of [the Oscar talk], and I don't think it should be [scaled back]," she says with a laugh before trying to deflect some of the praise.
"Look, I'm very gratified that people are responding to my performance, but I do feel like it's the whole thing with this one. There's not an ounce of fat on this film, no showoff-y directorial flair. It's just what the story needs. It's so tight — and it tightens as it goes along. I am the recipient of praise for something John conceived."
Amy Adams gives much of the credit for her Doubt performance to Streep who, during a tricky sequence, unselfishly stood for hours behind the camera feeding lines to the young actress.
"I kept messing up the words in this scene so we had to do about 11 takes but there wasn't an ounce of frustration or impatience or judgment from Meryl," says Adams. "She was so supportive of me."
After more than 30 years in the movie business, Streep is as surprised as anyone that, as she heads toward 60, she's more of a box-office magnet than ever before. After leaving her mark as a tragedian of the first order with films like The Deer Hunter, Sophie's Choice and Out of Africa, Streep has lightened up in recent years with hit comedies Adaptation and The Devil Wears Prada.
This summer, Streep delivered her loosest performance to date in Mamma Mia, a musical which surprised industry insiders by collecting $560 million at the box office, out-grossing musicals like West Side Story, Chicago and even Grease. The just-released DVD is expected to become one of the year's bestsellers.
For Streep, the box-office success of Mamma Mia was a "gratifying" vote of confidence. "It was so hard to get the financing for the film, and Mamma Mia cost about the same as the props budget for any Matrix film or, say, Hellboy," which opened around the same time. And Mamma Mia so outdid Hellboy at the box office," she whoops.
"But you just can't get [the studio executives] to understand that, that movies [with women] can earn their money back. I'm personally supporting Universal Pictures this year with Mamma Mia. We made it possible for all the other 'Hellboys' and 'Wanteds' to happen."
If Mamma Mia was 2008's feel-good musical, Doubt is one of the year's darkest dramas. As the mother of three daughters (and a son) with sculptor/husband Don Gummer, Streep says she was particularly interested in the movie's exploration of the changing role of women.
Even though Sister Aloysius is a severe, uptight character — the polar opposite of Mamma Mia's free-spirited Donna — Streep understood exactly where she was coming from.
"I was just trying to explain to my daughters that in 1967, I graduated from high school, and I was on my way to [Vassar] college," notes the actress, who was born in Summit, New Jersey and raised in Bernardsville and now lives in Connecticut and Manhattan.
"But it was understood that I would go to college with the aim of meeting someone to get married to and maybe to study a little something. The professions open to me, and I was smart, were teaching, nursing, hairdressing and show business, not law school.
"Now, my youngest daughter is applying to college this year, and the enrollments in the California university system are 60/40, women to men. The whole thing has really changed and yet not at the top, not in the hierarchy of the church. You'll never see a woman celebrate mass. There's no female mullahs and no female Dalai Lama."
Before filming began on Doubt, Streep spoke to a number of nuns who worked as educators back in the '60s, including a 96-year-old sister who, like Aloysius, oversaw New York's parochial school system.
"There were 70,000 kids in the Brooklyn schools alone, and this woman ran it all," says Streep. "That's like running a major corporation, and there wasn't a woman anywhere in New Jersey, where I grew up, running a business that size.
"So this woman had a gigantic responsibility — and yet she was still less. She was subservient to her parish priest. That's an interesting power dynamic. I'm sure it feeds into the antagonism you see in Doubt. How could it not?"
For her follow-up to Doubt, Streep will play chef Julia Child in the August 2009 film Julie and Julia. After that, she'll join forces with Something's Gotta Give director Nancy Myers for a comedy about a divorced woman who finds herself in a romantic triangle with a new beau (Steve Martin) and her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin).
"It's a comedy, but it has a little basis in something very real, a dilemma that I think people meet at a certain age," says Streep. "When you have a big history with someone and then have a big break, is it possible to fall in love again? That's the question the movie asks. It's sweet."
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2008.