Oxford Journal Newspaper

Already considered one of the greatest actors of her or any other generation, Meryl Streep takes on another iconic female in The Iron Lady.

She plays Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister and a figure that has divided opinion among British historians and public alike. The film portrays Thatcher, played by Streep, as an elderly woman recollecting the course of her premiership while battling with dementia.  

“I was already, of course, immediately interested,” Streep revealed, “because there aren’t many woman leaders, and there aren’t many filmmakers who are interested in investigating what it meant to be a woman leader.”

Just like Thatcher in the world of politics, Streep had to act opposite an almost all-male cast. “For me as an actor, just walking in on the first day of rehearsal was daunting,” she said. “Because there were all these wonderful British actors and I was the only woman in the room. I sort of had the feeling of what Margaret Thatcher must have had when she first walked into the Conservative party.”

Thatcher’s policies divide public opinion to this day - some heralding her as a political pioneer, others holding her as a political villain with much to answer for. The film focuses on the woman behind the politics, rather than looking into the issues of the day in forensic detail, and its star admits the movie is not an examination of the woman’s career.

“I didn’t come into the film with a political agenda about Margaret Thatcher, I actually knew shockingly little,” she said with a chuckle. “We were more concerned with the toll that power takes on a person, that kind of decision making where you’re the leader and the buck stops here, what does it do to you as a human and how much stamina does it take?"

Now that the movie is filmed and in cinemas, what is the lasting impression the actress will take away from the role? “One thing you really come away with an appreciation of, when playing a character of sort of Shakespearean proportions, is that you feel humbled and daunted by what she took on her shoulders.  It’s an enormous, terrifying, devastating position to be consigning people to life or death, and to put your head on the pillow at night. People think there is no toll. We do look at public figures as if they’re monsters or gods, and the truth is every sort of falls in the middle.”