NEW YORK—Meryl Streep is brilliant as a domineering, drug-addicted, cancer-suffering grandmother in her latest film “August: Osage County” but she won’t pretend to have the worst job in the world.
The star of the film, given a standing ovation at a prerelease screening in New York, the American actress was asked repeatedly how difficult she found her role.
Most difficult
Violet Weston is a bitter matriarch who bullies, ridicules and insults her dysfunctional relatives as they descend on the family home in Oklahoma for a funeral.
One of the most difficult scenes, Streep admitted, was riding in the back of a car knowing that she had to throw up. But she said the character was precisely the challenge that actors love.
“You can bring that back if you’ve been pregnant. You’re dragged kicking and screaming into the house of pain. But you just really love being there,” she said.
Her remarks came weeks after movie star Tom Cruise was quoted in the US media as comparing his job to fighting in Afghanistan.
The film, distributed by Weinstein and to be released on Christmas Day, also stars Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis as Streep’s three on-screen daughters.
Playwright Tracy Letts, who won a Pulitzer for the original play and wrote the screenplay, said Violet was based on his own grandmother who took on “monstrous proportions” in his eyes.
Streep, widely considered one of the world’s greatest film actresses, has already been tipped for another Academy Award for her latest mesmerizing performance. She last won an Oscar for her portrayal of controversial British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the 2011 movie “The Iron Lady.”
Long shoot
The cast lived together in adjoining townhouses during shooting and rehearsed the key dinner table scene—which took 3.5 days to film—at a pot-luck dinner party at Streep’s house.
The dinner scene is marred by insults, culminating in Roberts’ character wrestling Streep’s to the floor.
Actor Dermot Mulroney, who joked about no one eating the salad he made for a meal with the cast, paid tribute to Streep. “What Meryl was able to do in each take was be perfect,” he said. AFP