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Julia
Child was, of course, a late-blooming original -- a fearless
6'2"
American in Paris who took on the Cordon Bleu and male
chefs, publishing Mastering
the Art of French Cooking when she was
almost 50, and later going on to the famous
television career. Meryl
Streep at 60 is setting new highs -- with box office draw that is
unprecedented in Hollywood history for a woman of a certain age (Forbes
has her high on the list of top female moneymakers) and she takes Julie
& Julia and makes it hers, and perhaps what she possesses
in spades is not only the same fearlessness -- but a mischievous
joy in her work! We wrote earlier about the marvelous
time she seemed to be having in
Doubt(2008)
and that is exactly what she seems to be doing here -- taking a certain wicked
glee in her role that is simply irresistible! She has
apparently garnered a second generation of young fans who are
quite enamored with her after The Devil Wears Prada(2006)
and Mamma Mia!(2008) which together made more than a
billion dollars -- the young things are coming to see Meryl, not
Amy! The
French Lieutenant's Woman(1981), Sophie's Choice(1982),
and Out of Africa(1985) were the earlier incarnation…and
now, the older commanding woman who emerged a few years ago with
movies like The Hours (2002). Streep says her drama
school days were a time of "...hyperbolic drama that was out-sized and Brechtian, with an
expressionistic kind of acting, just like performance art
now. It didn't matter that it didn't bear any resemblance to
real behavior.…I wasn't grounded in the Method (school of
acting), which is based in realism: How much does the role
resemble me? So it wasn't a big deal for me to think that I
could play an old lady or somebody from another country. It wasn't
a dirty trick to assume another identity."
Her method is to begin with a voice; recall the marvelous
exaggerations of the Polish immigrant in Sophie's Choice,
or the Danish writer Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa.
She's larger than life, overdoes it, takes over the role and the
movie… As Child, she's got the clunkiness of
walk, the impression of height and awkwardness, the thrilling at
food, the trilling of voice.... Julie
& Julia, if you haven't seen it yet, is about Paris, food,
Julia Child, and Julie Powell who blogs about cooking the recipes from Mastering
the Art of French Cooking
over the course of a year. We
went to see the movie to watch Streep -- a big part of
the draw is to see her at the height of her career, having the
time of her life!
Read:
My
Life in France,
Julia Child & Alex Prud'homme
Cook:
Mastering
the Art of French Cooking
Tags:
paris
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