Serious star is Bjorn again

Meryl Streep plays Donna, a middle-aged woman who revisits her wild youth, in the film of musical Mamma Mia! Photo / Peter Mountain

As a young girl growing up in Bernardsville, New Jersey, Meryl Streep was a devotee of Broadway musicals. Her mother used to take her to see the likes of Ethel Merman and Carol Channing on stage in Manhattan and for many years the actress, who trained in music when she first went to university, nurtured the ambition to play the lead in a musical.

In the mid-1990s she went after the part of Evita in the film of the musical. At the time, her career was, by her own exceptional standards, in the doldrums.

Streep has won two Oscars and made the Academy shortlist a record 14 times, but she went a whole five years from 1991 to 1996 without an Oscar nomination. Of box-office flops, however, there was no shortage.

As the part of the brittle beauty began to dry up, she made a number of unwise excursions into comedy, most obviously with the mirthless She-Devil and Death Becomes Her.

She seemed heavy-handed, like the earnest teacher trying too hard to be amusing. Audiences either remained stony-faced or at home.

Suddenly, the leading actress of her generation was in danger of being a turnoff. The Evita producers went with Madonna. "I wanted to tear her throat out," Streep said of the singer afterwards, possibly displaying a belated grasp of humour.

Or possibly not.

Yet now, more than a decade later, her childhood dream has finally been realised in the unlikely form of Mamma Mia!, an adaptation of the hugely successful stage show based on the Abba songbook.

She saw the theatrical production in New York a few days after 9/11 and was so impressed she sent a fan letter to the creators, producer Judy Cramer, writer Catherine Johnson and director Phyllida Lloyd. The women kept the note and later returned the compliment by asking her to star in the film.

Streep, who is perhaps best known for playing women with foreign accents in serious issue-based cinema, is not the first person who springs to mind when one hears such lyrics as: "Feel the beat from the tambourine ... watch that scene/ Diggin' the dancing queen."

The word, though, is that Streep is a revelation as Donna Sheridan, the ageing hippie living on a Greek island with a grown-up daughter of uncertain male parentage. Her voice, which has previously been heard in Postcards From the Edge and A Prairie Home Companion, is said to be strong and her performance amusing and moving.

At 59, Streep seems to be enjoying the kind of career upturn that very few actresses experience in their fifth, let alone their sixth, decade.

She won plaudits for her roles in Adaptation and The Hours in 2002, but it was four years later as Miranda Priestly, the control-queen fashion magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada, that Streep established a new foothold in the public imagination.