Vote Meryl!

There was a time when a grand dame of the acting profession could be counted on to make an entrance with all the haughty grandeur her exalted position demanded, swathed in furs, cradling an insect-sized lapdog, the requisite entourage of Vuitton-toting flunkies trailing in her wake. But grandeur is not Meryl Streep's style. When she walks into a suite at New York's Essex House Hotel, a sunny smile and a friendly greeting are all that announce her arrival. She is wearing a beautifully embroidered cream-coloured jacket, both signally ethnic and Fifth Avenue chic without drawing undue attention to itself. A pair of intellectually inclined half-framed spectacles perch on her long, delicate nose. She looks more like a bestselling academic author on a book tour than a screen goddess. Or, in fact, like what she is: an Ivy League educated, well-to-do Connecticut wife and mother.

What she bears no resemblance to at all is her latest screen persona, the psychotically ambitious US Senator and obsessively doting mother Eleanor Prentiss Shawin director Jonathan Demme's remake of the John Frankenheimer Cold War classic The Manchurian Candidate. Shaw, a ruthless, powersuited Lady Macbeth, who serves up her beloved son - a meek Vice-Presidential candidate implanted with a mind-controlling microchip - to the machinations of the sinister, Halliburton-esque Manchurian Global corporation in pursuit of her own political agenda, is the latest in a peerless procession of bravura roles for Streep, and she sinks her teeth into it with characteristic relish.

'It's Greek tragedy,' she says. 'The hubris of this woman who thinks she can control everything, a mother who thinks she can control her child's life, loving him so much that she goes way, way over the cliff.' Obviously, she also had fun playing the villain for a change. 'My first great scene,' she says, 'is where Eleanor strides into the strategy session and tells the party brass why their policies are failing and what they need to do about it. She completely intimidates them with her passion and conviction. If she had a penis, you'd think, "Now, that is a powerful, powerful man." But because she's a woman, it's just terrifying. What a bitch! How dare she

presume to take over this meeting. Why isn't she sitting on the couch with the other women?'

It's a great scene, absolutely pivotal to the plot, and a rapid-fire burst of vintage Streep. In fact, she calibrates the momentum of it so effortlessly, gliding through the gears to its riveting crescendo with such polished ease, that you wonder whether this hasn't become a little too easy for her these days. 'Is that what it looks like to you?' she laughs, with mock indignation. 'No, I still create characters as carefully as I ever did. I usually have someone in mind who has certain characteristics that I steal flat out.'

There has been speculation that, in this case, that someone was Hillary Clinton, a figure for whom Streep admits a deep admiration. If nothing else, she has the hair down to a T. 'Well,' she says, 'which female politician does not have that hairstyle? It's like the 'Washington wash'n'go' cut that everybody has to have. It was a generic choice. I'm shocked people think it's Hillary. It's brown!'

There is something delightfully ironic in Streep playing a rabidly right-wing, power-mad politico. Although hardly outspoken, she makes no secret of her concern over social issues like the environment, women's rights, health care, education and has long been identified by conservatives as the epitome of the lattesipping, brie-munching Hollywood liberal elite. It's a stereotype that fits her like a glove.

Born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1949, Streep studied at the prestigious Dartmouth and Vassar colleges before enrolling in the Yale School Of Drama. She appeared in a dizzying number of student productions - as many as 40, according to some estimates - before graduating in 1971. Thereafter, she made an apparently seamless transition to the New York stage, triumphing in a series of productions both on and off Broadway.

She admits, however, that there were moments when her impeccably liberal conscience intervened. 'I was never really sure I wanted to be an actor until I got out of drama school,' she says. 'I thought acting was fun, but I didn't think it was an entirely serious way to conduct your life.' At one point she considered studying law. 'I was a true child of the Sixties,' she says, 'and I just thought there were other more useful things to do in the world.'

The legal profession's loss, of course, was our gain. Since her acclaimed debut in the 1977 movie Julia, Streep has become the most critically applauded actress of her time, racking up an unprecedented tally of outstanding performances in movies ranging from The Deer Hunter to Kramer vs. Kramer, Silkwood to Sophie's Choice and Adaptation to The Hours. She has received a record-breaking haul of Oscar nominations (11 and counting) and, at 55, remains the inspiration for pretty much the entire female population of Hollywood.

'That means a lot to me,' she says, 'because I know what the people who I looked up to meant to me; the people whose work thrilled me and who made me want to become an actor. When I was a young girl, I used to come home and watch The Four O'Clock Movie on TV, old black and white movies - they were even old for me,' she laughs. 'I loved all the great comic actresses: Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and Katharine Hepburn. I remember how I felt about these people and how much I needed them. You need people to inspire you, and what those actresses did was make me feel glad to be alive.'

For Streep, who lives in New England, far away from Lala Land, with her husband (who is not in the business) and those of their four children who have not left the nest, acting can still inspire joie de vivre - it is, she says, her passion. 'I love it,' she says. 'I don't get parts like Eleanor Shawoften, so when this came through, I called them up and said "Yes" before the dial tone came on. There aren't loads of scripts for people my age, so I've been lucky to get the ones I have. Acting is how I express myself. My family is the most important thing in the world to me. But it's a separate thing. I'm not living through my husband or my children. Acting is something I do for myself.'