New Yorker Magazine by calibre

Author:calibre
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2013-04-09T19:43:28.431000+00:00

Meryl Streep on the Iron Lady

Posted by Michael Schulman

April 8, 2013

But what does Meryl Streep have to say?

That’s the question I ask myself about most things—the “Mad Men” season première, North Korea, the bumblebee die-off—but particularly today, with the passing of Margaret Thatcher. Besides being a divisive Prime Minister, Thatcher was, almost as notably, a member of the Meryl Streep Has Played Me Club, whose exclusive membership includes Ethel Rosenberg, Julia Child, Karen Silkwood, Lindy Chamberlain, Nora Ephron, and our own Susan Orlean. Sometimes I wish these people could get together to swap notes on the experience, but, seeing as the bounds of earthly existence have likely kept them from being in the same room, probably not.

Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t look to the Greatest Living Actress for answers on how to make sense of the Iron Lady’s legacy. After all, Streep knew her as no one else did—as someone who inhabited her fully, in a so-so movie for which she nevertheless won (and deserved) an Academy Award. If Abraham Lincoln died tomorrow—which, God willing, he won’t—we’d want to hear from Daniel Day-Lewis. And so it was with eagerness that I opened a press release from Streep’s publicist this morning, with the subject “Statement from Meryl Streep.” The statement was elegantly composed and evenhanded:

Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer, willingly or unwillingly, for the role of women in politics. It is hard to imagine a part of our current history that has not been affected by measures she put forward in the UK at the end of the 20th century. Her hard-nosed fiscal measures took a toll on the poor, and her hands-off approach to financial regulation led to great wealth for others. There is an argument that her steadfast, almost emotional loyalty to the pound sterling has helped the UK weather the storms of European monetary uncertainty.

But to me she was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class bound and gender phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement. To have won it, not because she inherited position as the daughter of a great man, or the widow of an important man, but by dint of her own striving. To have withstood the special hatred and ridicule, unprecedented in my opinion, leveled in our time at a public figure who was not a mass murderer; and to have managed to keep her convictions attached to fervent ideals and ideas—wrongheaded or misguided as we might see them now—without corruption—I see that as evidence of some kind of greatness, worthy for the argument of history to settle.

Streep ended with some of the self-deprecation she does well—“I have only a glancing understanding of what her many struggles were, and how she managed to sail through to the other side”—having more or less just demonstrated the opposite. And then she sent her “respectful condolences” to Thatcher’s family and friends.

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