As I previewed yesterday, Meryl Streep covers the new January issue of Vogue Magazine. I thought she was just doing a Vogue cover – HER FIRST EVER – to promote The Iron Lady. Turns out that even The Amazing Meryl has more up her sleeve than a simple film promotion. One of the photos from the Annie Leibovitz shoot – the one where Meryl is walking in a garden – was specially organized because Meryl is a long-time supporter of “safe, organic, and ecologically sustainable food” and she’s a “shareholder in the Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) organization.” Thus, she posed in an organic farm. She also took Annie down to Washington so that she could pose with some of the Washington power players who are campaigning for a National Women’s History Museum. Meryl is also the NWHM National Spokesperson. Because Meryl really is that f–king cool. Anyway, you can read the whole (awesome) Vogue article here, and I suggest you do. I’ve read too many interviews with vapid, coked up morons who think their every burp is high art – Meryl is so refreshing. Bitch has a lot to say about everything.

Meryl’s thoughts on Thatcher: Streep knew “the outlines” of the rage that people had about Thatcher. “In this country, it was blended with anti-Reaganism,” she says, “but there was a special venom reserved for her, I felt, because she was a woman.” Streep very much felt a defensive instinct about her. “With any character I play, where she is me is where I meet her. It’s very easy to set people at arm’s length and judge them. Yes, you can judge the policies and the actions and the shortcomings—but to live inside that body is another thing entirely. And it’s humbling on a certain level and infuriating, just like it is to live in your own body. Because you recognize your own failings, and I have no doubt that she recognized hers.”

Did Thatcher ever recognize her own faults? Streep tilts her head and says evenly that Margaret Thatcher was remarkably nonjudgmental. “If you think of a conservative in the United States, we think of a sort of moral Puritan or something. She didn’t have any of those things.” She shrugs. “I don’t know about not promoting women. Here’s what really surprised me: From the moment the day started until it was three, four in the morning, she just never, ever stopped, and she worked so hard and relentlessly to be able to be in that position where what she said was the course the nation took. It was really extraordinary, her tirelessness, sheer stamina. When I say that, I really mean it, because I work hard, I know what working hard is and I know what staying up late is, and you can do it for a certain time. But to do it for eleven years? And out of power, to keep on with it, into the sunset? Superhuman.”

A story about women and power: “Women and power and diminishment of power and loss of power,” she says. “And reconciliation with your life when you come to a point when you’ve lived most of it and it’s behind you. I have always liked and been intrigued by older people, and the idea that behind them lives every human trauma, drama, glory, jokes, love.” She was close to her grandmother, and remembers her saying that her husband, Streep’s grandfather, would be out playing golf when the school-board elections would come up. “My grandmother didn’t give a damn about politics, but she really cared who was going to be on the school board, and she would go out, interrupt him on the eighth hole, and give him a piece of paper with the names of the candidates on it and tell him who to vote for—but she was not allowed to vote. She was not allowed to vote for dogcatcher in her town, never mind president. Never mind imagine being president.”

Meryl on her 35-year-long career: She never was an ingenue; when her first film came out, in 1977 (Julia, with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave), she was 28. In the eighties, the era of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, she made huge movies in a Babel of accents and dialects: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood, Out of Africa, A Cry in the Dark. In 1989, she turned 40. “I remember turning to my husband and saying, ‘Well, what should we do? Because it’s over.’ ” The following year, she received three offers to play witches in different movies. She saw the subtext pretty clearly: “Once women passed childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.” But with The Bridges of Madison County (1995) she captured “the audience that were my girls, that I knew they’d get it if we could get the movie made,” hence Dancing at Lughnasa and One True Thing, which were also about “women whose usefulness had passed.” And her last five years saw hit follow hit: The Devil Wears Prada, Mamma Mia!, Julie & Julia, It’s Complicated. That last film, she says, “in the period of Silkwood, could never have been made, with a 60-year-old actress deciding between her ex-husband and another man. With a 40-year-old actress it would never have been made.”

[From Vogue]

God, I feel like applauding after reading that article. Compare Meryl to so many of her male contemporaries – for example, take Meryl’s friend Robert DeNiro. He is very active in the revitalization of downtown New York, but he would never sit down for an interview and passionately discuss his decades-long involvements with multiple issues, charities and interests. DeNiro phones it in for the most part these days, with his career and his interests. And look at how vital and how passionate Meryl still is – she’s amazing.

Photos courtesy of Leibovitz/Vogue, slideshow here.