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In The French Lieutenant's Woman, a film in which the sanity of her 19th century character is in grave doubt, what Streep manages to convey when she is not speaking is extraordinary. She is pleased with the performance. "I luff effrythink I do, darlink," she says, giving a brief Zsa Zsa Gabor imitation. Then she lapses into the somewhat prosy shoptalk of a college-educated actress: "When I read the book, it elicited an emotional reaction in me and I determined to re-create it for someone else through thinking and design, thought and craft. The arc I designed for the character went up and happened." Then the arc-and-craft jargon drops away, and she says a bit wistfully: "Watching the film, I couldn't help wishing that I was more beautiful. There comes a point when you have to look the part, especially in movies. In Victorian literature, passion, an illicit feeling, was always represented by darkness. I'm so fair that dark hair makes me look like some old fish, so I opted for auburn hair instead. I really wished I was the kind of actress who could have just stood there and said it all."
Streep's unusual looks give her, at 32, the flexibility to play anything from a hag to a beauty, and she is aware of this. "I know I'm good-looking enough to play any of the women I usually play—individuals in the world. But for this character with her intense beauty, it wasn't enough." She laughs at herself. "I once went up for King of the Gypsies, a Dino De Laurentiis film. His son, who has since died [in July] in a plane crash, remarked to his father in Italian, 'But she's not beautiful.' It didn't bother me as much that he said it, as that he said it in Italian. I did Italian 105 at Vassar. I told him I understood and that it didn't matter anyway. But I never forgot it. 'What does he mean?' I told myself, 'I was voted Best Looking in my high school.' "
The remark is made with airy irony, but the fact is that she went through an ugly-duckling stage in late childhood—glasses, fat cheeks, permed hair and a bossy, show-offy disposition, as she recalls it. "She was pretty ghastly," admits her younger brother "Third" (Harry Streep III), 30, a modern dancer who heads the Third Dance Theater in Manhattan. It was by no means a terrible childhood, Streep says now. The family lived comfortably in a succession of pleasant New Jersey towns. Harry Streep II was a pharmaceutical company executive, and his wife Mary Louise a commercial artist. The parents were "fond of us, to put it mildly; they thought we were the greatest thing ever born," says Meryl. The elder Streeps, now retired and living in Mystic, Conn., were forever taking Meryl and their two boys (Brother Dana, 28, is a bonds salesman who lives in New Jersey) to museums, the theater, the ballet and ball games. But Meryl had few friends, and as far as anyone knew only one asset, a "nice, light, coloratura voice." At twelve she began taking singing lessons in Manhattan with Voice Coach Estelle Liebling (and gradually became aware that the "nice lady who had the lesson before me" was Opera Star Beverly Sills).