I have a confession to make: I want to be like Meryl Streep when I grow up.

Not because of the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts, but because she has created a category of her own woman that is made up of the richness of the characters she has played in the cinema. Her female characters are unconventional and live moving dramas that, interpreted with total credibility, make up the icon of women Meryl Streep.

The issues that have surrounded her in the cinema deserve a review, because it has taught us to see life from other perspectives.

Maternity

Within the mother archetype, Streep has portrayed a wide variety of characters on screen.

In 1979, at the beginning of her career and in a secondary role, Streep plays a woman who dumps Woody Allen and ends up having an affair with her best friend, with whom she takes care of their son, in Manhattan. A plot that, in 2023, could have made her the protagonist of a television series.

In that same year, he gave life to Joanna, a woman with professional ambitions that forces Dustin Hoffman to rethink his paternity in Kramer contra Kramer –her first Oscar award, for Best Supporting Actress–. This drama showed in its time that family roles were changing and that sex did not determine being a better or worse caregiver.

Sophie’s decision – second Oscar, for Best Leading Actress – also questions motherhood, thanks to a woman devastated for not having been able to protect her children in Auschwitz. Although she survives the concentration camp, the experience and her regrets mark the rest of her life. Sophie’s role contrasts years later with the one she plays Streep in wild riveran adventure and risk film in which his character manages to defend his family against kidnappers.

In things that matter y August embodies a mother who is diagnosed with cancer. In both films it is portrayed that the treatment of the disease, for better or for worse, is a family thing.

Marriage and infidelity

Great love stories have also been a constant in Streep’s filmography.

In 1984 she fell in love with Robert de Niro and he with her in a romantic film that brings to the fore an issue such as infidelity, with inevitable reference to brief encounter. We learned from that story that Fell in love It’s not for children and, a year later, in Memories of Africa, that marriage has little to do with feelings and much to do with business. Her character, Karen Blixen, experiences, however, together with her lover, in the skin of Robert Redford, another way of loving, freer and far from the need for agreements or promises.

Streep lose faith in marriage, but she marries Jack Nicholson in the cake is over –fictionalized portrait of the marriage and divorce between the screenwriter Nora Ephron and the journalist Carl Berstein– and ends up being the victim of infidelity. It is also in Life and loves of a devil. To this grievance he reacts with revenge and humor. It continues with the comic genre in Death suits you goodwhere jealousy and envy take over her and her co-star, Goldie Hawn, and together they manage to drive Bruce Willis crazy.

years after his affair with Redford, relive a similar story with Clint Eastwood in The bridges of Madison. Francesca and Robert taught us to safeguard privacy until the moment of our last wishes, when infidelity has already been banned and confessing what happened cannot change anything of what we have been.

Commanding

Her interpretations related to power have turned her into a (fantastic) villain on many occasions. The Eleanor of the messenger of fear She is a senator with great ambition who directs her son’s life so that he reaches the presidency of the Government using very bad arts. Anything goes to achieve her goal, even if it makes her a disreputable mother.

Reaches a certain point of tenderness in The Devil Wears Pradaas ruthless as she is elegant and as villainous as a heroine, when her feared Miranda Priestly uses her influence to give her children the manuscript of the latest installment of Harry Potter. Thanks to Streep, Priestly is a character without waste.

The actress feels great about power. In him she grows, as in the role of Margaret Thatcher in The woman of iron -which gave her her last Oscar-, in that of the leader of the feminist movement Emmeline Pankhurst in suffragetteswhile investigating the Panama Papers in The laundryplaying Katherine Graham, the first editor of the Washington Post in The Pentagon Files or being the (incapable) president of the United States in don’t look up.

Music

Like Roberta Guaspari, Streep brought classical music to impoverished New Yorkers in Music of the heart. Given his vocal abilities, she performs very well in the musical genre. she has sung in Oh mama!, Into the Woods, Ricki, The Prom y The return of Mary Poppins.

But if a musical role in his work must be highlighted, it is the interpretation he makes of Florence Foster Jenkins, a wealthy woman with few musical skills who, pushed by her dream of being a singer, came to fill theaters in New York. A moving role from a true story interpreted with such skill and respect that it does not leave you indifferent.

The icon Meryl Streep

After this brief review of his cinematographic experiences, I ask myself: what is worth more: the person or the character? And since I don’t have an answer, I’ll stick with the icon, with what Meryl Streep represents in the collective imagination, that’s what I admire. The set of nuances with which Streep has built a category of woman, with her multiple facets (all real), her passions and experiences. With everything she has made us feel and that, on many occasions, she represents us.

Marta de Miguel Zamora, Professor of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, King Juan Carlos University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.