The roles Meryl Streep was offended at being offered: “We don’t know what to do with you”
There are few people in the business of entertainment with a name as famous as Meryl Streep, inducing “oohs” and “aahs” as people collectively fawn over her monumental legacy and success. From her devastating performance as a struggling mother in Kramer VS Kramer to the steely gaze of a fashion titan in The Devil Wears Prada, Streep has indisputably left a lasting mark as one of the best actors of her generation.
However, like many women in Hollywood, there comes a point where you begin to struggle with the narrow-minded and chauvinistic producers who believe female actors lose their ability to be on screen after a certain age, delegating them to roles that mirror the way they perceive them, which is, lacking in value or desirability. And despite her own level of prestige in the industry, this was an issue that Streep also had to deal with, repeatedly turning down one role in particular.
Actors like Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, and Naomi Watts have all spoken about the wary advice they were given when they first started acting, told to scoop up all the roles they could get while they were young because, after the age of 35 they would be dead to Hollywood. Over the years, older women have slowly been erased from cinematic history or delegated to insulting parts from quite early on in their lives, reflecting the way that people value youth and physical beauty in women and that ageing is seen as the antithesis of this, banishing women from the screen so as not to bear witness to this very natural process.
When Streep discussed her career, she spoke about the frequency of being offered a certain role after she turned 40, saying she was asked to play “…witches, to play three different witches in three different contexts. But it was almost like the world was saying—or the studios were saying—we don’t know what to do with you.”
Many iconic actors over the years have been encouraged to play insulting roles that imply older women are grotesque or people to be pitied, or with much younger women playing older women, such as Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman.
Streep expanded on this, saying, “I mean, I’ve repeated this before many times, but I remember being shocked to find out that Bette Davis was 40 or 41 when she did All About Eve and was playing an over-the-hill, done, out-of-it, you’re-finished actress and that she was only 50 when she did Baby Jane and ‘Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte’, and those grotesques of witches. You could call them witches. So, yeah, I think there was for a long time in the movie business, a period of when a woman was attractive and marriageable or something – not marriageable”.
But in recent years, there has been an active effort to push for more substantial roles for women, especially women who would typically be excluded from certain roles once they reach the age of 30. Coralie Fargeat’s recent film The Substance pokes fun at this notion and has opened up a new conversation about our attitudes towards youth and ageing, which will hopefully help us reframe this as something to embrace, not fear.
