77th Cannes Film Festival: Meryl Streep, Hollywood Exception

Meryl Streep, the exceptionally long-lived actress who will receive the honorary Palme d’Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday evening, has defied Hollywood rules by playing serious women throughout an impressive film.

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In its fifty-year career, “The Queen Meryl” has received almost every distinction, including 21 Oscars and 3 Golden Statues.

Elle is a collaborator with Michael Cimino, Sidney Pollock, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh …

“I have everything I could dream of,” she admitted in 2011 after her third Oscar win. “Let us leave some to others! Frankly, I get that we’re tired of Streep. Even for me, it shocks me!

Described as the best actress in the world – a title that this brilliant woman categorically rejected – she has long presented herself as a mother of four children, married to the same man for 45 years, and, incidentally, worked in the cinema.

“She was the most mysterious person I knew. She was simply a young American woman, beautiful, healthy, attractive, intelligent,” said Alan J. in 1982. Bakula said. “But once she’s playing, she’s a very mysterious woman.”

With a peculiar beauty, a high forehead and a slightly deviated nose, this blonde does not conform to Hollywood standards. When she debuted in 1976, producer Dino De Laurentiis considered her “too ugly” for the remake of “King Kong.”

Women’s stories

Born in New Jersey on June 22, 1949, Mary Louise Streep grew up in a happy middle-class family and discovered the joys of the stage in high school.

With an excellent memory and a gift for enunciation, he earned a master’s degree in theater from Yale.

On Broadway, he juggled between roles and was spotted by Hollywood. It was Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver” who convinced her to try cinema: “I told myself that when I grow up I want to be an actress for her talent!”

“Dazzled” by her screen debut in “Julia” (1977), she received her first Oscar nomination for her second film, “Voyage au bout de l’enfer” (1978), where she balanced the male narrative of Vietnam. War.

She contrasts with other actresses by playing ordinary, ruthless, women who tell another story of the 20th century.

In “Kramer vs. Kramer” — her first Oscar (1979) — she played a mother who leaves her family before demanding custody of her son. It bears witness to the lives of millions of Western women, torn between their home and their need for freedom.

In melodrama – “The French Lieutenant’s Mistress” (1981) – she is unforgettable as a Holocaust survivor in “Sophie’s Choice” (2nd Oscar) and as Karen Blixen in “Out of Africa” ​​(1985).

Humor against obsolescence

In his forties, seeing opportunities dwindling, he ventured into the comedy “Death You So Well” (1992). Three years later, Clint Eastwood gave him one of his best roles in “On the Road to Madison.”

The same masterstroke with the comedy “The Devil Wears Prada” in 2006, at the threshold of the sixties, allowed him to breathe extraordinary speed into his life. Completely uninhibited, he shouted “Mamma Mia!” He returned to music. (2008) and won a third Oscar for “The Iron Lady”.

“Rather than disappearing into an obsolete tradition after the fifties, he defied Hollywood conventions and reached new heights,” wrote his biographer Michael Shulman. “No actress born before 1960 has ever acted in Hollywood without being rejected by Meryl first.”

The dean of the progressive Hollywood elite, a staunch opponent of Trump, “Saint Meryl” was ousted from his pedestal in 2017 when #MeToo erupted. “Your silence is the problem,” insists Rose McGowan, one of the first actresses to denounce Harvey Weinstein. . Meryl Streep says she had no idea about the behavior of the producer, whom she described as “God.”

She donated her fee from “The Iron Lady” to her project for the National Women’s History Museum, teaming up with George Clooney to raise $15 million to support a 2023 actors’ and screenwriters’ strike.