The character Meryl Streep felt closest to: “More like I really am than any other part”
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(Credits: Far Out / TCM)
The entire point of acting is people pretending to be somebody they’re not, but sometimes a role can hit much closer to home than usual, which Meryl Streep found out when she played a character who was more like her than any other.
No stranger to embodying real-life figures, Streep has lent her talents to more than a few biographical dramas. During the course of a distinguished career she’s inhabited author Karen Blixen, convicted murderer Lindy Chamberlain, violinist Roberta Guaspari, political activist Emmeline Pankhurst, and former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, among others.
It’s part of the job for any performer with eyes on longevity to tick the biopic box several times over, but one of them burrowed deeper beneath the skin than the rest. Streep’s research and preparation revealed a kinship that made the part less of an assignment and more of an extension of herself.
Mike Nichols’ 1983 film Silkwood starred Streep in the lead role as the chemical technician and union representative who perished under mysterious circumstances. After becoming concerned about the safety risks that could potentially arise from working at a nuclear facility, she agrees to testify about it.
Raising awareness for workers and the conditions they’re placed under, Silkwood discovered that her own body contained traces of plutonium contamination. However, when she was driving to meet with a journalist and a union rep, she was killed in a car crash, giving rise to plenty of conspiracy theories.
Streep secured her obligatory ‘Best Actress’ nomination at the Academy Awards for yet another showstopping turn, but getting into the right mindset came a lot easier than usual after she admitted there was a kinship between them in terms of both their personalities and upbringings.
“I think Karen is more like I really am than any other part I’ve been able to play,” she told Roger Ebert. “I grew up in small towns, I worked for a living, I lived for a while in a commune in Vermont where nobody had any money and nobody knew whose things were whose; just like in Karen’s household. I felt we were a lot alike. And another thing that’s the same. If I die, nobody will know what I was really like, and that’s the truth.”
Those similarities helped enhance what Streep was able to bring to the role, without a doubt, but that sort of inadvertent connection to a character can often be a difficult one to shake off. They’d grown up in similar manners and experienced many of the same things, only for Silkwood to be killed at the age of only 28.
At least, when filming began, Streep was in her mid-30s, so that was one less thing she needed to worry about.
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