The “heartbreaking and thankless” role Meryl Streep called her most difficult
For many stars, a large part of the joy of acting comes from being received well, so playing a divisive character is never going to be easy. Meryl Streep learned this the hard way when she portrayed someone whom she described as “charmless”, which challenged her approach to performance.
Streep has often taken on complex roles – that’s how she has become such a Hollywood icon – but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t sometimes found herself playing characters that have really pushed her to her limits.
It’s perhaps hardest when she’s playing a character that is based on a real-life figure, because you can’t exactly separate the challenging parts of a narrative from reality when you know they actually happened. There are various roles you could assume Streep might pick as the most challenging, like Sophie’s Choice, which, while fictional, is heavily based in reality as her character faces impossible choices during her time at Auschwitz.
That understandably won Streep an Oscar, but it’s not the role she feels is her most challenging, though. Rather, it was a slightly less well-known film starring the actor – one that only grossed $6.9million despite its $15m price tag – which she holds as the one that was the most difficult to immerse herself in.
Based on the case of a nine-week-old baby called Azaria Chamberlain who went missing in 1980, Evil Angels, also known as A Cry in the Dark, saw Streep play her mother, Lindy, while Sam Neill portrayed her father, Michael.
When Azaria went missing, the Chamberlains were arrested on suspicion of her murder, but they were adamant that they had nothing to do with her going missing and that she was, in fact, taken by a dingo. After they were convicted in 1982, it wasn’t until 1988, just before the release of the film, that they were officially cleared of all charges. Interestingly, it took until 2012 for Azaria to be officially pronounced dead, with her cause of death being determined as the result of being taken and killed by a dingo, just as the Chamberlains had claimed all along.
Yet, the Chamberlains were subject to plenty of media attention and scrutiny, and Streep had to try and master a character who was not only experiencing the grief of losing her baby but also facing false accusations and brutal public opinion.
“Lindy Chamberlain was hard. But challenging, not hard. Just challenging. Heartbreaking and kind of thankless because… basically, actors like to be loved, and I was playing a character whose job was not to be ingratiating,” Streep told The Oklahoman.
“I was playing a charmless character. It’s much more fun to play somebody that you enjoy yourself because you know other people will enjoy it.” Emerging several years after the Australian New Wave took hold in the 1970s, Evil Angels carries the movement’s emphasis on tragedy, with director Fred Schepisi focusing his lens on the suffering faced by the Chamberlains.
It’s an underrated performance from Streep, who earned another Academy Award nomination for the part, although she ultimately didn’t win this time.
