The icon Clint Eastwood called America’s most important actor: “I felt they overlooked the potential”
Clint Eastwood takes a no-nonsense approach to directing, so it’s not surprising that he’d take a no-nonsense approach to casting as well. When he knows he likes someone, he offers them the job, no equivocating about it. This has turned out pretty well for everyone involved in his movies over the years. Since 1971, his films have netted two ‘Best Picture’ Oscars and seven Oscars for directing or acting.
When it came time to cast his 1995 tearjerker The Bridges of Madison County, Eastwood was facing pressure to seek talent outside the US. Based on the bestselling novel of the same name, the film centres on an Italian war bride living in a small Iowa town in the 1960s who has a passionate, short-lived affair with a visiting photojournalist while her husband and two children are away.
Eastwood was set to play the photojournalist, but when they started discussing who might play the female lead, he was at odds with the producers. “For some reason, everybody early in the game thought that we should find a European gal for the part,” the director told The New York Times in 1994. “I just didn’t understand why. I felt they overlooked the potential of American actresses, and Meryl Streep is one of our most important.”
He wasn’t wrong. Even in the early ‘90s, Streep had already sealed her reputation as one of the greatest living actors in the US and elsewhere. She’d already won two Oscars and been nominated a whopping seven additional times. She’d shown that she could play any type of character from any background or era and transform, chameleon-like, into the role.
In defence of Eastwood’s collaborators, however, it makes sense that, when casting the role of an Italian woman, you might want to at least consider Italian actors, but the director wouldn’t hear of it. Streep was the only person offered the role, and she was equally decisive about taking it as the director was about offering it.
At the time, she was already committed to playing a virus-hunting scientist alongside Robert Redford in Crisis in the Hot Zone, an adaptation of a non-fiction thriller by Richard Preston. However, she dropped out of the project as soon as she got the call from Eastwood, saying that, even though she was not a fan of the source material, she was impressed by the script written by Ron Bass and Richard LaGravenese. As a result of her change of heart, Redford’s film was never made.
Streep probably had no regrets in the end about jumping ship. The Bridges of Madison County was met with glowing reviews and strong box office numbers, and the actor earned yet another Oscar nomination for her performance. In retrospect, it seems almost insulting that Eastwood would only identify her as “one of” the most important actors in the US rather than the greatest actor of her generation, but given that she had yet to play Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, he can be forgiven for his lack of foresight.
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