This year, the International Rome Film Festival will be bestowing its Acting Award on the actress for her career, her personality and her style, following in the footsteps of former recipients Sean Connery, Sophia Loren and Al Pacino. Streep is so popular it is almost superfluous to explain the reasons for this recognition. But then again, this is precisely why it is essential to get a closer look at the underlying causes of this success. From this point of view, Mrs. Streep seems as determined and resourceful as many of the characters she has played. She started to win prizes the moment she appeared on screen (the Emmy Award for Holocaust); she holds a record-breaking number of nominations (15 for the Oscars® and 23 for the Golden Globes); and her performance in Mamma mia! last year finally laid to rest the prejudice that she was too good at drama to become likeable and funny in a comedy (an opinion that held sway in Hollywood in the 1980s and ’90s after comedies like Heartburn, She Devil and Death Becomes Her, also due to their modest box office performance). Considered the most talented actress of her generation at the end of the 1970s, in the decade that followed Streep was forced to feel the cold shoulder given to actresses over thirty by the American majors. This led her to remark that the studios didn’t offer these women leading roles because bosses didn’t want to see an image that reminded them of their first wife. She has a plethora of strengths: she is acknowledged as the most talented actress around at tackling foreign accents; she has porcelain skin; a mass of shiny hair that captures the light in the shot; is a first-rate mimic; her oval face radiates a delicate and incessant expressivity; and she has an impeccable, all-encompassing technique (a trained voice thanks to singing lessons as a girl and a solid background in dance). Streep had to face the barbs inevitably fired at someone considered too perfect to be real, perhaps even more than Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis or Jane Fonda in their day, all nevertheless actresses like her, with both the skill and the luck to exemplify performing excellence on the screen. “The delicious robot” was how she was described by John Cazale, the great actor from The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon. They were actually romantically linked and Streep cared for him until his untimely death, shortly after completing The Deer Hunter (there has been much mention of Cazale in Rome: Francis Ford Coppola and Al Pacino discussed him at length at past editions, and this year, with the agreement of Meryl Streep, the retrospective of films in her honour will include I Knew It Was You, evoking the brief but dazzling career of this extraordinary actor). It seems incredible, especially for today’s audiences who know Streep for being a highly emotive actress, but in reality, her toughest battle was against the impression of coldness and perfection emanating from her strident on-screen appearances. The selection of films in the retrospective/tribute (chosen with the actress’s approval) widely deflects these barbs. How many other actresses have exposed themselves to rise to the challenge of discarding the traditional maternal image (in films such as Kramer vs. Kramer, A Cry in the Dark or The Manchurian Candidate)? And how many have explored beyond the already-established boundaries of female characters constrained – by their times or by male subjection – into overly restricted or humiliating lives (in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Plenty and Out of Africa)? Streep conquered new, unknown territories for female identity, in the cinematographic imagination and in cultural society, often highlighting far from reassuring or rewarding aspects. If she portrayed women forced to make sacrifices with memorable radicalism and refinement in films such as Falling in Love or The Bridges of Madison County, it is works like The Devil Wears Prada, Mamma Mia! or Doubt – albeit in drastically different ways – that have enabled her to depict women who appear to know exactly how to handle the domination, power, control and pleasure-seeking typically identified with men. In reality, Mrs. Streep is unrivalled in the complex narration of both these elements (in underestimated films such as One True Thing or Adaptation): all her substantial characters are fully immersed in the battle between controlling or letting go of their emotions. This is why everyone loves her. From Sophie’s Choice to The Devil Wears Prada, perhaps the two extremes of an extraordinarily wide-ranging gallery (typical of the greatest performers), from a mother/martyr to a mother/wicked stepmother. This actress seems to lead the audience on a discovery of the unprecedented, or rather the similarities between tyranny and panic, inveterate hatred and extreme vulnerability, as if both are permanently lying in ambush and she is there to fight them for us, like a delicious warrior. This extraordinary actress has been sending back detailed, painful and touching reports from this war in every film for over thirty years. All the emotions she has generated on screen cannot help but remind us of something familiar, and perhaps unconfessable.