What Is So Compelling About Meryl Streep?

She's held some of the most memorable and notorious film roles in modern Hollywood history. According to IMDB, she's "considered by many movie reviewers to be the greatest living film actress."

She riveted us in The Devil Wears Prada as Anna Wintour's icy alter ego (and with her unforgettable deadpan, "Florals? In spring? Groundbreaking"). We couldn't take our eyes off her sloppy, singing self when she played Donna Sheridan in the converted Broadway musical Mamma Mia (yes, Ms. Streep actually sang). And if you've seen her latest coup of a role, as Julia Child in Julie and Julia, you'll agree: She's done it again.

With a relentlessly theatrical sing-song voice and persona, which is apparently a dead-on imitation of how Ms. Child actually was, Ms. Streep chatters, flourishes and comically cooks her way through this sweet, happy cream puff of a film.

As the New Yorker aptly put it: "Julia Child, in The French Chef - her first TV series, which began in 1963 - was amazingly quick. Moving her pots and pans and little bowls of chopped onions and clarified butter around the counter, she might have been a three-card-monte player in Times Square. In Julia and Julia, Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed, and her star, Meryl Streep, push the mannerisms a bit. Like a tall ship in full sail, Streep leans, tilts, and billows. Odd explosions of air - whoops, exclamations - come hurtling through the passageways. She runs out of breath, then settles, mysteriously, like an old Bible that italicizes ordinary words, on a single syllable. It's all extremely funny, but Ephron and Streep stop short of camp. They know that there's no way anyone can make, or would want to make, Julia Child look second-rate."

I would imagine this is true. But I know more about Meryl Streep than I do Julia Child, and I think her true talent lies in her ability to play a persona, real, made-up, living or dead, midway between how the public might like to imagine this person, and how that person really was.

Take Anna Wintour, for example. She is, without a doubt, the most successful female editor in fashion. And if we're honest, we know that all the tales of the dragon lady clearly mask something more real, complex, and probably just as worth talking about - a strong, highly intelligent and ambitious woman who shot to the top of an ultra-competitive, cutthroat field. But that's not the story The Devil Wears Prada aims to tell. Viewers are not interested in how or why Ms. Wintour did what she did to get where she is; what they want to see is her humanlessness, her lack of mercy and compassion for a young go-getter who just wants to get through this crappy, shallow fashion job so she can become a New York journalist. And that she does.

But I digress. What was, and is so compelling about Streep in roles like Anna Wintour and Julia Child, is she makes the inaccessible figures of fame feel tangible to the ranks of average Americans. We get to gasp in shock and hiss in dismay when "Miranda" orders her poor assistant Andy, who is at dinner with her very distressed father, to "GET ME HOME!" from Florida, where a hurricane rages outside. We get to love and hate Miranda Priestly simultaneously (for who doesn't reel with satisfaction during her monologue about Andy's lumpy blue sweater, which is actually cerulean, and was in fact "selected for her by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff"?).

The same is true for Meryl Streep playing Julia Child. Ms. Child is lovable, endearing and down-to-earth (I fought the urge to refer to her as Julia). When her husband, Paul, asks her over dinner at a Parisian restaurant as Julia is trying to decide what to do with her time in France, "What is it you REALLY like to do?" She replies, bubbily as ever: "Eat!"

Now really, who can't relate to that?