Best Actress: Meryl Streep
By
February 9, 2012
The 2012 Oscars are fast upon us! Among the Best Actress hopefuls is Meryl Streep, nominated (for the 17th time!) for her role in The Iron Lady. We’ve spoken to Streep a few times over the years, and when we had her on our cover back in December of 1998, she had quite a bit to say about critics and the acting craft:
“I always wanted to get together a group of actors and talk about the process and write it all down and send it to all the major critics so they’d know what actors do. I don’t think they do know. They judge it, yet they don’t know what it is that they are looking at. Most of them-even the most sophisticated-are swept away by whether it’s a character they like or dislike. They confuse the dancer with the dance…They’re like children who want to believe in Santa Claus. Some critics categorically refuse to believe that Santa Claus is their dad with a beard. That it really is that person, that Jack Nicholson is like Jack Nicholson. 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.”
Click here to read the full interview.
