Streep outlines mysterious art of acting in university address

Popular and respected actress delivers Belknap Lecture before a spellbound audience.

By: Jake Uitti
   "I stand before you as an exemplar of the art of acting," said Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep on Thursday at Princeton University. "An art that I find in its deepest essence to be mysterious."
   Ms. Streep, a 13-time Academy Award nominee, speaking at the university as the Belknap Visitor in the Humanities, was met with warm applause. She was selected to deliver this year’s Belknap Lecture because of her range of experience, both on stage and in film.
   A humbled Ms. Streep said it was empathy — the ability to feel the other — that was so important in her career as an actress.
   "In this ever-divided world," she said, "it’s all about listening."
   Ms. Streep, who has appeared in "The Deer Hunter," "Kramer vs. Kramer" and "Adaptation," among many other films, said acting is not always about the rules. In fact, she said, the rules are often set aside for the more visceral impulse and feeling.
   "There are so many actors who flaunt the rules who deliver perfectly wonderful acting and characterizations," she said.
   Therefore, she said, the rules can be reduced to mere suggestions.
   Ms. Streep said she has been willfully ignorant about what has made her the accomplished actress that the public has grown to know.
   "I have cultivated a certain deliberate reluctance to investigate my own method of working," she said with a smile. "Because I’m afraid to kill the goose."
   If she were to sit down and analyze the poetry of it, she said, the work would diminish itself to the flavor of a car owner’s manual.
   "Self-consciousness — concentrating constantly on how you’re doing something while you’re doing it — is death for the actor," she said.
   It is for this reason, she added, that she cannot ever see herself teaching acting.
   Ms. Streep, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, said in her time at Yale she had three acting teachers who offered three passionate, yet very diverse, methods of acting.
   "Each with completely different theories," she said. It was then she figured out that acting was beyond something that could be taught — for her, at least — and that it is much more personal, something she could not put her finger directly on.
   She said there were teachers in other subjects, however, who did have a profound influence on her.
   Ms. Streep, who grew up in Bernardsville in Somerset County, said in college she would be made to stand up and recite poetry. It was in these classes she learned the "necessity of each line."
   Trying to place where her talent for acting came from, Ms. Streep paused for a moment — and said it came from her gut.
   "My center of strength is located somewhere slightly below the belt," she said, "where breath actually comes from."
   This is her engine, she said. It is this place where her characters come from.
   "The people I have played in movies and in theater have felt like me, they are a part of me," she said.
   A given character she plays, she said, consumes her intimately during the performance, but once the job is done, "they stay in the trailer."
   She has received criticism, she said, from people wondering why the breadth of her roles takes her so far away from who she is seen as being.
   "To those people I say, ‘Why did God invent imagination?’ Should I play a woman from Central Jersey my whole life?"
   Instead, Ms. Streep said, she chooses to take on challenging roles of characters not easily defined — those women, she said, who are often misunderstood.
   While growing up in New Jersey, Ms. Streep said her mother would take her to New York City.
   "Once or twice a year, my mother would wake me up and say, ‘Today’s your day’," she said, snapping her fingers, "and we’d go to New York, New York."
   It was in New York, she said, that she felt the connection to a diverse group of people all at once, especially on those occasions when she and her mother visited the United Nations building.
   "Going to the U.N. opened up the door to the idea of peace," she said.
   She said she saw the translators in the U.N. building working to find a common language for all the different people on the floor.
   "I guess I’ve never given up that dream of being a translator," she said. "To find a common language. That’s the little engine of my work."