The award-winning role Meryl Streep only played for the money: “I make no bones about that”
It’s incredibly difficult to imagine a time when Meryl Streep wasn’t, well, Meryl Streep. In her early career, though, she was like any other young actress trying to transition from the New York stage to film and television. While her career undoubtedly took off pretty quickly as a movie actor, she did have to pay her dues for a short while in parts she wasn’t exactly thrilled about. Why? Because they paid her rent. Interestingly, though, one of these parts landed her an Emmy award for ‘Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie,’ yet she still found it less than gratifying.
In the early 1970s, Streep attended Yale University on a scholarship and established herself as a core member of the Yale Repertory Theatre. This professional theatre opened in 1966 and, over the years, became known as a hotbed for developing acting talent. While she attended the university, Streep appeared in seven of the eight plays staged there. She then graduated in 1975 with a ton of acting experience under her belt – not to mention a ton of student debt.
After Yale, Streep plied her trade on stage in productions of Henry V and Measure for Measure at New York’s Delacorte Theatre, as well as The Cherry Orchard and Happy End in the Vivian Beaumont and Martin Beck theatres. It didn’t take long for her to start landing screen jobs, though, and in 1977, she starred in the TV movie The Deadliest Season and two episodes of the anthology series Great Performances. That year, she also starred in her first movie, the Oscar-nominated World War II drama Julia, which put her on the map as a film actor.
Interestingly, though, not long before Streep starred in her second film, The Deer Hunter – which landed her a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nomination – and movie stardom beckoned, she had one last high-profile TV gig. In NBC’s miniseries Holocaust, which aired across five nights to a mind-boggling 109million viewers, Streep played Inga, a German woman who commits herself to a concentration camp to be with her Jewish husband.
While some criticised the series for turning the extermination of the Jews into something resembling a soap opera, it was also praised for raising awareness of the Nazi’s atrocities among the American public. It won the Emmy Award for ‘Outstanding Limited Series,’ along with three acting trophies, one of which came Streep’s way. However, in an interview with Horizon magazine from the same year the miniseries was released, Streep was brutally honest about why she agreed to star in it. “I did it for the money,” Streep admitted. “I need it very badly, and I make no bones about that.”
It was obvious that Streep took as dim a view of the series as some of its critics. Barring a few voice roles and the odd TV movie, it would take until 2003’s Angels in America for her to accept another significant television role. Indeed, perhaps she resented the fame that only TV can bring when more than 100million people brought her into their own homes.
“The other day, I was riding my bike through Chelsea when these four guys in a Volkswagen started yelling at me out of the window, ‘Hey, Holocaust, hey, Holocaust!'” she told Horizon in utter bafflement. “Can you imagine? It’s absurd that that episode in history can be reduced to people screaming out of car windows at an actress.”
