She just brought home another bookend, that golden statuette whose true weight in gold may only be fifty dollars in today's recession in the US.
She must have coveted it, like the four other nominees, waiting there, wanting, willing, wishing that her name be called. Why else would she have sat through 17 Oscar nights, the number of times she was nominated and showed, or pretended to show, that she was happy when someone else bagged the prize? So 14 times she went home empty-handed. Billy Crystal got her there.
Yet she knows herself enough, is aware that at 62 going on 63, the members of the Academy may already be thinking, "Three is enough. We can continue nominating her, but let some young punk win best actress next time."
Yes, she is aware that this may be the last of the coveted prizes in a town where the young, the buffed, the svelte with some years in drama school to make their resumes gleam are exalted. Who knows? This may have been the same town where a term like "trophy wife" was first coined.
How much of her magic comes from knowing herself deeply and also having a loyal hair and makeup stylist all these decades? When she has no project and the stylist is off servicing another actor on another film, what does this woman, who has come to represent women's voices, not just their accents, mind you, do and think?
Let the movie scribes write their conjectures: how she must have felt the depths of true love and loss as lover to fellow actor John Cazale, with whom she stayed till he breathed his last; how she relearns to open her heart and allow another love in, have a superbly normal family life with a sculptor who, being an artist himself, understands the demons she wrestles with as she gets into character.
What this admirer from afar, who has followed her from the TV mini series Holocaust to where she stood onstage this morning, golden and shimmering like the statuette she clasped, would like to see is Meryl Streep studying the life, then playing the role, of Georgia O'Keefe. O'Keefe in her 90s, mind you again, but still infused with the prickliness of a desert cactus. And Ms. Streep doing it as she enters her 70s.
Photo from Getty Images
She must have coveted it, like the four other nominees, waiting there, wanting, willing, wishing that her name be called. Why else would she have sat through 17 Oscar nights, the number of times she was nominated and showed, or pretended to show, that she was happy when someone else bagged the prize? So 14 times she went home empty-handed. Billy Crystal got her there.
Yet she knows herself enough, is aware that at 62 going on 63, the members of the Academy may already be thinking, "Three is enough. We can continue nominating her, but let some young punk win best actress next time."
Yes, she is aware that this may be the last of the coveted prizes in a town where the young, the buffed, the svelte with some years in drama school to make their resumes gleam are exalted. Who knows? This may have been the same town where a term like "trophy wife" was first coined.
How much of her magic comes from knowing herself deeply and also having a loyal hair and makeup stylist all these decades? When she has no project and the stylist is off servicing another actor on another film, what does this woman, who has come to represent women's voices, not just their accents, mind you, do and think?
Let the movie scribes write their conjectures: how she must have felt the depths of true love and loss as lover to fellow actor John Cazale, with whom she stayed till he breathed his last; how she relearns to open her heart and allow another love in, have a superbly normal family life with a sculptor who, being an artist himself, understands the demons she wrestles with as she gets into character.
What this admirer from afar, who has followed her from the TV mini series Holocaust to where she stood onstage this morning, golden and shimmering like the statuette she clasped, would like to see is Meryl Streep studying the life, then playing the role, of Georgia O'Keefe. O'Keefe in her 90s, mind you again, but still infused with the prickliness of a desert cactus. And Ms. Streep doing it as she enters her 70s.
Photo from Getty Images
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