LONDON: Meryl Streep, whose portrayal of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady” is tipped for an Oscar, takes to the red carpet Wednesday for the film’s European premiere in London.
Streep’s performance as the grocer’s daughter who changed the face of Britain has earned her a Golden Globe nomination, putting her in line to win the third Oscar of her career next month.
The film has already opened in Australia and the United States, but its premiere at the BFI Southbank along the Thames from the Houses of Parliament which Thatcher dominated for more than a decade, has special resonance.
Few of Thatcher’s cabinet colleagues or rivals have seen the film, which only opens in Britain on Friday, yet many who have say Streep has captured the essence of the woman whose legacy is still the subject of intense debate.
Charles Moore, who is writing Thatcher’s authorised biography, said: “She captures the intense, uneasy, passionate woman rising to greatness, the Gloriana figure at the height of her power, and the rather touching old lady known to her intimates as ‘Lady T’.”Film critics have pointed to Streep’s bouffant hair and trademark blue outfits as near-perfect, and the distinctive voice which she worked so hard to perfect pierces through the dialogue.
Streep has confessed she knew little about Thatcher’s policies before accepting the role but said she saw the film as less about politics and more about “what was the cost of her political decisions on her as a human being”.
Director Phyllida Lloyd – the woman behind the Abba smash hit “Mamma Mia!”– starts the action in the present day, with an elderly Thatcher clearing out
her late husband Denis’s clothes.
The ghost of Denis, played by Jim Broadbent, himself an Oscar winner in 2002, is ever present as his wife looks back on her career as she rises from modest beginnings to become Britain’s first and still only woman premier.
Thatcher took over a country whose economy was sorely in need of modernisation, yet the often ruthless way she achieved her goals continues to divide opinion, as does her rush to war over the Falklands.
Yet Streep also shows her undoubted toughness as she brushes off the IRA’s attempt to kill her in the bombing of a Brighton hotel in 1984.
While Streep’s acting has won acclaim, the film overall has not met with unanimous critical acclaim.
Some critics say it brushes over important issues such as her deep and bitter dispute with the coal miners, which gripped Britain in the mid-1980s, and some of her supporters have responded negatively to her portrayal.
Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s loyal press secretary when she was in office, has taken issue with the film showing his old boss, who at the age of 86 is rarely seen in public, as “demented”.
“She is not demented when I see her,” Ingham wrote in the Yorkshire Post.
“She takes a lively interest in what I have to tell her about the latest follies and, while prevented by loss of short-term memory from cross-examining and arguing with me, she clearly shows her frustration in wishing to do so.”Norman Tebbit, a hardline Conservative who served in Thatcher’s government from 1979 to 1987, condemned the “half-hysterical, over-emotional” woman portrayed by Streep, saying it bore little resemblance to the Thatcher he knew.
SOURCE : DAWN
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