Meryl Streep names the greatest performance she’s ever seen: “Raw and extraordinary”
You’re never too old to find inspiration, even if you’re already considered one of the greatest actors of all time. Meryl Streep has lent herself to countless acclaimed films over the years, but it’s her openness to expanding her practice and welcoming the influence of others that has kept her in the spotlight.
She was initially inspired to become a film actor after she watched Robert De Niro perform as Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, a deeply impressive portrayal of a man who loses his grip on reality. Until this point, Streep was happy remaining a theatre actor, but she soon realised that cinema has the power to immortalise a performance forever.
Streep ended up working alongside De Niro in the early days of her screen career, appearing in The Deer Hunter in 1978, which earned her an Oscar nomination. Evidently, Streep made the right choice of transitioning to cinema, and she has since become the most nominated actor in Academy Award history, with 21 nods to her name and three wins.
While Streep is now one of the biggest film stars in the world, she still loves theatre, having sporadically returned over the years for productions such as The Seagull and Mother Courage and Her Children. The actor regularly goes to the theatre, too, and there was a time when a visit left her in pure awe, leading her to describe a performance she’d seen as one of the best she’d ever had the joy of witnessing.
It was a production of Tennessee Williams’ timeless play, A Streetcar Named Desire, that stirred something inside Streep, specifically Cate Blanchett’s performance as Blanche DuBois. Streep witnessed her magnificent display of talent at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and she was mesmerised by her take on the iconic character, who believes in the kindness of strangers despite her insecurities and tarnished reputation.
Talking to The Herald Sun, Streep revealed, “That performance was as naked, as raw and extraordinary and astonishing and surprising and scary as anything I’ve ever seen, and it didn’t have anything to do with what clothes she took off, you know what I mean? She took the layers of a person and just peeled them away. I thought I’d seen that play, I thought I knew all the lines by heart, because I’ve seen it so many times, but I’d never seen the play until I saw that performance.”
Blanchett earned rave reviews for her performance as Blanche, which was directed by Swedish actor and filmmaker Liv Ullmann for the Sydney Theatre Company. Streep wasn’t the only person who was blown away by the performance, with Jane Fonda similarly shedding heaps of praise onto Blanchett and Ullmann.
A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the most iconic plays of all time, and it takes a lot to transform it into something that feels fresh and exciting. Despite the fact that Streep was already incredibly familiar with the play, she was deeply inspired by Blanchett, who took a well-known role and delivered an utterly unforgettable interpretation.
