Streep in pre-production make up
Howard Elston, our entertainment reporter, with a scoop to send movie fans scurrying for the multiplexes.
Meryl Streep, ripe for Oscar awards with her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady, is set to play news boss Rupert Murdoch, Hollywood insiders told me last night.
Speaking to Tinseltown’s movers and shakers, I was told that the international publishing magnate is in the actress’s sites.
‘She really got your former Prime Minister down to a tee.’ I was told over Bellinis and peanut butter sandwiches now favoured by the film world.
‘Sir Murdoch is next.’
Ms Streep has been on the Hollywood scene for close to four decades even though, in this reporter’s humble opinion, she really never got the angelic tones of Abba really right.
But whatever you think, critics agree she can take on the persona of her characters.
Who else, for instance, could copy the antics of a woman such as Mrs Thatcher who destroyed a fifth of the UK industrial base; inflicted pain and poverty on dozens of blue collar towns and communities; encouraged greed and class hatred; demonised the unions; backed rampant privitisation that led to poor under-maintained railways and money grubbing private health industries; defended murderous tyrants like Pinochet; sucked up to nutcases like President Ronald Reagan even when he was ga-ga; pilloried Nelson Mandela and deregulated the financial world to such an extend that it unleashed the foul state the City is in today.
Well, movie lovers, it is Meryl Streep that can do this.
And now she is going to play Mr Murdoch, the man who didn’t know how his newspapers rooted around people’s rubbish bins; monstered people outside their doors; hacked into their phones and answering machines; paid off cops and pilloried anything his demented editors didn’t like, understand or felt Rupert didn’t care for.
‘Meryl’s got the gifts to show Rupert’s skills in business. All she has to learn is how to cheat and hate’ said Nigel, a movie expert now living on Tyneside. ‘Plus she has to have an empty reptilian stare, a bald head, the face of a deflated toad and a sincere belief that he has the right to lie to the UK public.’
‘After that, she’s a a shoo-in for another Oscar.’