Meryl Streep mixes humor, candor while reflecting on acting career

"I'm very honored and grateful to be invited here," Meryl Streep began her address in McCosh 50 last night, "to be the Belknap prisoner ... vis ... to be the Belknap pris ... visitor!"

"Oh my god," she said of her gaffe as the packed audience burst into laughter. "Today I said, 'Does anybody still believe in Freud?' And now I know."

With this, the Academy Award-winning actress threw up her arms and launched into an engaging 45-minute talk on the art of acting, touching on her childhood in central New Jersey, her constant battle against self-consciousness and the importance of listening.

Streep, a veteran of over 50 films — including "Kramer versus Kramer," "Sophie's Choice" and "The Devil Wears Prada" — spoke as the Belknap Visitor in the Humanities, an honor previously bestowed on such artists as Arthur Miller, Twyla Tharp and Maurice Sendak. The program, which was founded in the memory of Chauncey Belknap '12, invites a distinguished person in the arts and letters to campus each year to spend a day or two interacting with students and faculty.

Though the lecture sold out in a matter of minutes when tickets became available on Monday, several dozen people waited outside the hall last night hoping to fill vacant seats. The mere sight of Streep walking into McCosh caused one woman in the audience to almost burst out clapping.

Michael Cadden, director of the Program in Theater and Dance and a classmate of Streep's at the Yale School of Drama, introduced her as "the greatest actor of my generation."

Streep, however, carried the title of acting legend with humor and self-effacement, repeatedly questioning her expertise and poking fun at her celebrity. Responding to Cadden's generous introduction, she said, "I feel like I have to go lie down now. Such an energetic life this woman has had."

Though she said she felt intimidated in front of "a room throbbing with expertise," Streep later added, "If they'd let women in when I was in high school, and if they'd had SAT tutors in math, I may have come here, too."

Famous for her chameleon-like ability to transform into virtually any persona — including a fashion magazine editor, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, a rabbi and an angel — she said her accomplishments don't compare to those of the real life people she's impersonated.

"I'm here under false pretenses. Oh, I guess I'm really here because my pretenses are pretty good. I'm not really sure what contribution I've made to the humanities," she said. "I've basically pretended to be extraordinary people my entire life and now I'm being mistaken for one."

For the rest of the discussion, Streep focused on the teaching of acting and the driving forces behind her work.

Acting, Streep said, is an art that "no one, as far as I'm concerned, has figured out how to talk about."

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"I've cultivated a deliberate reluctance to investigate my own method of working because I'm afraid of killing the goose," she said. "I'm afraid if I parse it I won't be able to do it anymore."

She did say, though, that her appreciation for music, dance and poetry has benefited her acting career as much as any drama class ever has.

"I came away from drama school [thinking], 'Well, nobody knows anything about drama,'" she said. Instead of adopting a set of rules for acting, "I decided to make it up as I went along."

She also explained that the driving force behind her work is empathy, a selfless emotion that somehow survived Darwinian natural selection. "Empathy is the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a character in a story ... It's a mysterious, invaluable resource in the human survival kit."

Though Streep majored in drama at Vassar College, she said she had initially wanted to become a translator. This early interest in translation, which was born after a childhood visit to the United Nations, explains many of her character choices, she said. "If I can mount a pathetic defense of all the accents and the foreigners it's a desire to connect us to them, me to you, to find a common language, that's the little engine of my work," Streep said.

"In this increasingly divided world," she concluded, "I hope we remember the truth that every actor knows: That it's all about listening. That's my very heavy ending of my very heavy speech."