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Enter the Dragons

Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada
  • Posted at 3:17pm
  • 09 November 2007
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

In 1989, Meryl Streep, greatest screen actress of her generation, played a romantic novelist and sex object in She-Devil, while Roseanne Barr filled the role of the dowdy-turned-satanic housewife who sets out to bring her down. Crucially, Streep was 40, and just about to cross that invisible Hollywood divide where the glam female roles dry up and you get to play mums ... or monsters.

For a few years, Streep slipped into a domestic holding pattern. Then, entering her 50s, she forged a new and rewarding sideline in fearsome harridans. First, the monstrous, machiavellian senator in The Manchurian Candidate, then the fire-breathing fashion editor-in-chief in The Devil Wears Prada, for which she earned a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. She’s currently a heartless intelligence bigwig in political drama Rendition, and hissing should by rights accompany her every entrance.

Glenn Close, finding herself in the same ageist wilderness after Fatal Attraction, reinvented herself in the 90s as a pantomime villainess – the puppy-skinning Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians and its sequel – ending up on TV as a scary judge in The West Wing and a ball-breaking boss in The Shield.

Queen of the battle-axes remains Shirley MacLaine, whose second coming began with 1989’s Steel Magnolias, and runs through to the recent In Her Shoes and Bewitched.

It seems that only Jodie Foster, 45 next week, is pushing against Hollywood’s patriarchal orthodoxy – playing action mums in the likes of Panic Room and Flightplan.

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