Marvelous Meryl

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This article was published 11/06/2016 (3760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Life is not fair.

This well-researched and crisply penned look of American acting legend Meryl Streep’s early life proves the truth of this maxim.

Streep, who turns 67 on June 22, has dominated Hollywood for 40 years, chewing up scenery in dramas, musicals and comedies.

Turning 40 is usually a death knell for actresses, but Streep works continuously. With 76 films under her garter belt — coming up in August is a dramatic comedy about bad opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins — she has earned countless awards, including three Oscars.

Though her roots in small-town New Jersey are resolutely middle-class, she shone as early as age 12, when her singing teacher (who also taught the soprano Beverly Sills) singled her out.

From then on, according to first-time author Michael Schulman, an arts editor with the New Yorker magazine, she always led the pack.

In high school, Mary Louise Streep (shortened to Meryl by her mother) was a popular cheerleader and homecoming queen. She nabbed the leads in school musicals and dated the cutest boys.

As Schulman states: “Meryl was someone who got what she wanted.”

Streep (her father’s surname is German, not Dutch as commonly thought) continued her winning ways at college. Though she entered Vassar (the Ivy League women’s college in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) with no specific goal, her drama teacher pounced on her when she delivered a Blanche Dubois monologue from A Streetcar Named Desire.

“You’re good!” he exclaimed. “You’re good!”

When she got a scholarship in 1972 to do a master’s degree at the prestigious Yale Drama School, the die was cast. Even among such classmates as actress Sigourney Weaver and playwrights Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang, she blew everyone away.

Schulman reports a new phrase, “to Streep it up,” entered the drama school lexicon. It meant, according to another classmate, costume designer William Ivey Long: “Take the stage. Own your character. Make everyone look at you.”

Schulman details the remarkable speed with which Streep segued from theatre to screen, thanks to standout roles in two 1978 productions, the TV miniseries Holocaust and the Vietnam War film The Deer Hunter.

Despite its fawning tone, Her Again is not an authorized bio. Streep did not sit for interviews with Schulman, nor did her two younger brothers or her current friends.

This did not stop Schulman. He interviewed her old friends, including lovers, teachers and colleagues, and unearthed seemingly every quote she has ever given.

He discusses at length all her singular traits: her non-conventional beauty, her feminism, her gift for accents.

The book ends in 1980, with Streep’s first Oscar win, as best supporting actress in Kramer vs. Kramer, though not before Schulman dishes on her fraught relationship with co-star Dustin Hoffman.

Schulman takes his title, by the way, from Streep’s 2012 best actress speech for the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady (her 17th nomination).

“When they called my name,” she said from the podium, “I had this feeling I could hear half of America going… ‘Her again?’”

Given Streep’s charmed beginnings, this book suffers from a notable lack of melodrama: no poverty-stricken childhood, no substance-abuse problems, no suicide attempts.

The one trauma in her life, Schulman emphasizes, was the 1978 cancer death of her actor boyfriend John Cazale (Fredo in The Godfather), whom she met as his co-star in a 1975 Broadway production of Measure for Measure.

According to people around her at the time, Streep acquitted herself with Florence Nightingale-like dignity in caring for Cazale.

But within a year she had met and married the sculptor Don Gummer. The couple has four grown children, all of whom work in some facet of show business.

Former Free Press books editor Morley Walker won a lifetime achievement award at this year’s Manitoba Book Awards.