‘The (un-Botoxed) Face of a Hollywood Revolution’: Meryl Streep and the ‘Greying’ of Mainstream Cinema

Abstract

In a January 2010 Vanity Fair profile of Meryl Streep, Leslie Bennetts proclaimed with some wonder that against all expectations in an industry seemingly preoccupied by youth, at 60 the star had become Hollywood’s ‘new box-office queen’.¹ With a record-breaking 18 Academy Award nominations (including three wins) under her belt and a film career dating back to 1977, Streep’s CV might be considered exceptional by anyone’s standards in terms of longevity and critical success. Yet as Bennetts noted, ‘even her most ardent fans, until recently, wouldn’t have linked her name with blockbuster receipts.’² Following the phenomenal success of Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008) and Julie and Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009), however, Streep has become box-office gold. Since it has long been received wisdom in the industry that studio executives and the highly sought after young male audience have little interest in films about women, and even less about older ones, Streep’s reinvention was all the more remarkable; it was nothing short of ‘a Hollywood revolution’, in fact, as the subsequent success of rom-com It’s Complicated (Nancy Meyers, 2010) underlined further still. Indeed, the box-office performance of all these films appears to point to changes in cinema-going demographics and the growing evidence that ‘new’ audiences, including groups of older women, are becoming increasingly important to the industry.