Meryl Streep: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

5 Awesome Performances...

5. Clarissa Vaughan - The Hours (2002)

Whilst Streep often excelled in embodying real-life people in films €“ she won accolades for her part as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, where what could have been a shallow pantomime impersonation was far more fully-realised and sympathetic €“ in The Hours it's Nicole Kidman that got the gongs for her performance as Virginia Woolf. Streep's appearance in the film, meanwhile, is as a character in the modern day who is the living embodiment of the titular character from Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. As New Yorker Clarissa Vaughan she has a quite dignity and intensity that suffuses the rest of Stephen Daldry's film, which also stars Julianne Moore. The scenes with Streep are perhaps the highlight of the film, however, as she spends a day preparing for a party she's throwing for her old lover and friend Richard, a poet and author living with AIDS who is to receive a major literary award. It's an emotionally devastating but even-handed film, and Streep nails it.