Why did Meryl Streep compare Jack Nicholson to Santa Claus?
Meryl Streep is one of those film industry figures whose name is often preceded by superlatives like “legendary” and “iconic”. After breaking through on the New York stage, she earned an Academy Award nomination for only her second film role in 1978’s The Deer Hunter. Since then, Streep has become the most nominated female actor in Oscars history, with 21 nods to date, three of which have resulted in wins: ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer and ‘Best Actress’ for 1982’s Sophie’s Choice and 2011’s The Iron Lady.
Having garnered such intense acclaim throughout her career, Streep has become a near-mythic figure to some, with gifts that her most passionate fans might claim border on the superhuman. She is by no means the only figure in Hollywood to receive such effusive praise, yet while there may be some actors who thrive on it, Streep has always taken it with a large pinch of salt.
Discussing her career, Streep once said of such overly enthusiastic critics: “They’re like children who want to believe in Santa Claus. Some critics categorically refuse to believe Santa Claus is their dad with a beard. That it really is the person, that Jack Nicholson is like Jack Nicholson.”
At the time, Streep had recently worked with Jack Nicholson—another of the select few three-time Oscar-winning actors (alongside Walter Brennan, Ingrid Bergman, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Frances McDormand)—on the 1986 romantic comedy Heartburn. This collaboration nearly didn’t happen, as Nicholson was a last-minute replacement for Mandy Patinkin, who was fired after director Mike Nichols determined he was not the right fit for the role.
By all accounts, Nicholson was a bit of a handful on Heartburn, not least because he quickly developed a crush on Streep, as did Nichols. Still, neither this nor the film’s critical and commercial underperformance was enough to keep Streep from working with Nicholson and Nichols again the following year on the depression-era drama Ironweed.
Nicholson is far from the only titan of stage and screen that Streep has worked alongside. She starred with Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter, a film in which her then-boyfriend, the late John Cazale, also appeared before tragically passing away shortly after filming. Streep later collaborated with Al Pacino in the 2003 TV mini-series Angels in America. Another notable co-star is Dustin Hoffman, with whom she shared the screen in Kramer vs. Kramer. Hoffman’s controversial treatment of Streep during that film resurfaced amid the #MeToo movement, alongside numerous sexual misconduct allegations against the actor.
While Streep may be outspoken in her admiration for many of her notable collaborators, she knows better than most that, much like Streep herself, may sometimes be spoken of in near-religious terms, they’re simply people doing work when all is said and done.
As Streep explains: “The news is that most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they’re doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they’re doing. There is a craft.”
