Word: streeps
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...Streep's unusual looks give her, at 32, the flexibility to play anything from a hag to a beauty, and she is aware of this. "I know I'm good-looking enough to play any of the women I usually play?individuals in the world. But for this character with her intense beauty, it wasn't enough." She laughs at herself. "I once went up for King of the Gypsies, a Dino De Laurentiis film. His son, who has since died [in July] in a plane crash, remarked to his father in Italian, 'But she's not beautiful.' It didn...
...remark is made with airy irony, but the fact is that she went through an ugly-duckling stage in late childhood?glasses, fat cheeks, permed hair and a bossy, show-offy disposition, as she recalls it. "She was pretty ghastly," admits her younger brother "Third" (Harry Streep III), 30, a modern dancer who heads the Third Dance Theater in Manhattan. It was by no means a terrible childhood, Streep says now. The family lived comfortably in a succession of pleasant New Jersey towns. Harry Streep II was a pharmaceutical company executive, and his wife Mary Louise a commercial artist...
Singing was not enough, however; a complete transformation was required. The passage of time and the ingestion of enough peanut butter sandwiches usually do transform twelve-year-old children, of course. But Streep sees what she calls "my makeover" as a willed act, accomplished with contact lenses, a bottle of peroxide and an iron determination. By the time she entered Bernards High School in Bernardsville, N.J., she had indeed become "the perfect Seventeen magazine knockout," acting out what she calls "my first characterization; I played the blond homecoming queen for several years." It was not a mindless, giddy time, however...
...Streep's career had begun, and its record since then has been a matter of theater people of increasing authority repeating those first cries of astonishment. She enrolled at Vassar, then a college for women. In the nonconformist atmosphere of the late 1960s she was able to slop around there in jeans, with an old felt hat pulled down to her ears, and drop her pom-pom girl impersonation for good. She established herself quickly as an actress at Vassar. She never seemed to care especially about being a star, recalls Clinton Atkinson, who directed her in the demanding lead...
...matter of fact, yes, you would. And Streep's remarkable parade of successes marched without a pause from Yale to New York. It does not seem accurate to speak of lucky breaks. Streep talked herself into a Public Theater audition for Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells and Impresario Joe Papp asked her to play a featured part. But the truth surely is that if it had not been Papp who took her in hand, it would have been some other director. The Trelawny role was followed by a spectacular success at Manhattan's Phoenix Theater, when she played...