It’s hard to imagine that there was a time before Meryl Streep was the greatest-living actress—a time when acting was only a faraway idea inside the future Oscar winner’s head. And in a new conversation with Michelle Obama, for More magazine, Streep discusses the person who gave her the confidence to literally act on her aspirations.
“My mentor was my mother,” Streep revealed. “She was a mentor because she said to me, ‘Meryl, you’re capable. You’re so great.’ She was saying, ‘You can do whatever you put your mind to. If you’re lazy, you’re not going to get it done. But if you put your mind to it, you can do anything.’ And I believed her.”
In fact, her mother’s encouragement was so consistent that Streep says it gave her an abundance of confidence. “[S]he said it from the time I was little,” Streep added. “And that made me arrogant."
Even at 65, Streep still finds herself channeling her mother for an extra boost of confidence. “I’m much more of an introvert [than my mother]. I’m much more inclined to want to not say anything in public. When I have to be in the spotlight, I think to myself, Mary [Streep] could do it. It’s a good thing, to imagine yourself doing something you think you can’t. I do that every day, because basically, if I had my way, I’d just stay home and think about what I’m having for supper.”
Even as an introvert, and even at the very beginning of her carer, Streep’s confidence allowed her to approach another acting legend, Jane Fonda, and ask her the kind of hard questions Fonda never could of asked her own entertainment idols.
In an interview last year, Fonda said, “I was close to Bette Davis [growing up]. I was close to Barbara Stanwyck [and] Katharine Hepburn. And why didn’t I ask them endless questions? ‘What do you do when you are nervous? How do you overcome fear?’ And I didn’t!”
“You know the only person who has ever asked me those kinds of questions?” Fonda continued. “And of course it would be her: Meryl Streep.”
Streep has spoken about the first time she was on a film set—for the 1977 drama Julia—and her confidence was so wonderfully disproportionate to her experience that she felt comfortable trying to riff on the script’s dialogue in an early scene with Fonda. In the four decades since, Streep has credited Fonda for “open[ing] probably more doors than I probably even know about.”
Streep and Obama—the First Ladies of Hollywood and the United States—spoke in person for More’s July-August issue. Susan Pocharski, entertainment director of the women’s magazine, who was there for the conversation, reveals, “There was a lot of laughter in the room. . .They were both incredibly down to earth, real, thoughtful (and) they care about the same issues that every other woman thinks about, which is how to balance work and family and how to make an impact in the world.”
Michelle Obama is not the only person in her family to keep company with Streep. Last year, the president presented the actress with the Medal of Freedom, and these adoring words: “I love Meryl Streep. Her husband knows I love her. Michelle knows I love her. There's nothing they can do about it.”
