Playing Margaret Thatcher must be great for an actress like Meryl Streep. Thesps just love it when they get the chance to play vile people from history. Murderers, rapists, sex offenders and the like give an actor the opportunity to feel brave and bold.
And ol’ Streepy knew too well that pretty much everyone on Earth hates Thatcher. This is something that made her ”more interested” in portraying the heartless witch in ‘The Iron Lady’.
And Meryl has some theories on why everyone despised her so much and… well… she’s off the mark really.
The North of England hates Margaret Thatcher almost unreservedly. Seriously. Being a Tory in Ultra-Labourite Manchester is akin to being a leper. A leper who likes the music of James Blunt. A James Blunt loving leper in a Liverpool FC shirt.
And so, when Meryl Streep appeared randomly at Freya and Graham McAnally’s wedding at Manchester town hall, you’d have to assume only one thing…
…that locals gathered ’round Streep, figured she was the closest thing they’d get to seeing Thatcher in the flesh, and kicked her to death.
The best way to win the respect of your acting peers is to go ugly. Monstrously ugly. For example, people fawn over those brave enough to play Hitler. Or a wife-beater. Or some kind of sex offender.
In the case of Meryl Streep, she’s being touted as a likely Oscar winner for her turn as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.
It takes nerve to play the biggest on-screen monster since Cloverfield.
We’ll start with the bad news – there’s going to be a film about Margaret Thatcher. Want the mediocre news?
Meryl Streep might be playing Thatcher. And now for the amazing news – it’s being directed by Phyllida Lloyd. You know, the woman who directed Mamma Mia! This means that the film will almost certainly contain a sequence when, wracked with private guilt over the sinking of the Belgrano, Margaret Thatcher decides to cheer herself up by putting on a pair of dungarees and doing the splits while Nigel Lawson – played by Pierce Bronson – atonally grunts his way through an old disco tune.
This Margaret Thatcher film is going to be AWESOME. But only if it contains the exact sequence that we’ve just described.
Right, everyone needs to calm down. Get a nice sweet tea, run yourself a hot bath, sprinkle rose petals around the house. Allow your clothes to slide gently from your body, and dab sprinkles of baby oil onto your thighs. That’s it. Mmm, feel the soft breeze leaping and dancing around your underpants.
Now put on that Best of Alexander O’Neal compilation that was specifically designed to soothe you. And relax. Relaxed? Then listen carefully – there isn’t an Oscar curse. That’s right. Shhhhh…
Yes, it’s true that Sandra Bullock’s wholesome life partner MIGHT have spent a few long evenings smearing his podgy sausage hands all over a woman with tatts on her bosoms, but this could have been going on for AGES. Even during Sandra’s period in the desert when she was just another non-Oscar winner. A nobody.
As for the others – Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon, Julia Roberts, the one who was a boy in that film about being confused – they were all probably just terrible wives.
Now wake the hell up, because here’s something really uplifting! It’s a handful of beautiful thespians who still have husbands/lesbian partners, despite winning an Oscar! See? There’s no hex! You’re so SWEET with your silly craziness. Read More >>>
Julie and Julia has all of the winning ingredients of your lady-happy chick-flick, mixed with some run-of-the-mill award baiting biographical gubbins and sprinkled with a couple of ‘it’ leads – but this recipe is overcooked.
It’s hard to find a more likeable lady in Hollywood than Amy Adams, with the innocent twinkle in her eye and an irresistible charm to her performances, she is perfectly capable here of portraying one half of this twin-bio as Julie Powell. The other half comes from Meryl Streep, in another performance for her to literally chew on in the hope it’ll shit out a few more awards. Here she jumps into some big shoes to play the hormonally challenged Julia Child.
It is really Streep’s show – as you would expect – managing to make a decent embodiment of Child and her eccentricities, including the voice that sounds like a drowning goat. It’s a thorough performance and slaps a bit of smugness on Streep’s part (she must have had some space in her awards cupboard to fill).
As we may have mentioned already, last night hecklerspray got to report from the red carpet at the 2009 BAFTAs.
And, it’s fair to say, we were rubbish. Thanks to a mixture of horrible weather, a position on the BAFTAs red carpet directly opposite all the real journalists and our own genuinely backwards people skills, we ended up coming away from the BAFTAs with nothing more than trenchfoot, a lack of feeling in any of our extremities and this slightly humiliating video.
We’ll have a full BAFTA report coming up in a few hours – but in the meantime, do feel free to revel in this visual evidence of our thundering social ineptitude.
Has Rob Brydon got hair plugs? (certainly looked like it on telly the other day. They’d probably suit him – if we couldn’t see where the stitches burrow into his scalp)
www.cjdavies.com (he’s not a happy bunny, but he is a funny bunny)
High Velocity Bowling on PS3 (just don’t crack your 42” plasma by letting the controller fly out of your hand)
Dreary Meryl Streep (and she hopes the Oscar goes to…)
Facebreakeron PS3 (make a boxer from your own photo who looks nothing like you. That’s it)
Kate Winslet in ‘that dress’ (she steps out of the dress, gravity takes its toll like a pebble dropped from 10,000 feet. That’s the truth, guys. The sad, sad truth)
Playing Margaret Thatcher must be great for an actress like Meryl Streep. Thesps just love it when they get the chance to play vile people from history. Murderers, rapists, sex offenders and the like give an actor the opportunity to feel brave and bold.
