Meryl Streep enjoys the ride back up

Meryl Streep loves to tell the story about how one learns to be king. It dates to her days at Yale Drama School, when the instructor asked the students how to portray a monarch. "And everybody said, 'Oh you are assertive,' and people would say, 'Oh you speak in a slightly deeper voice.' And the teacher said, 'Wrong. The way to be king is to have everybody in the room quiet when you come in.' The atmosphere changes. It's all up to everybody else to make you king. I thought that was really powerful information."
It's hard not to think of that story after one meets Streep, perhaps the reigning queen of American movies, who in the last several years has had an unexpected career renaissance -- at 59 -- playing women who make the DNA of those who encounter her flutter and mutate. It's a rare achievement. In modern Hollywood, only Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood have had comparable return engagements with audience affection, and they're not actresses, who are routinely considered washed up at 40.
Now, after almost 30 years of being perennially more admired than beloved, the double Oscar winner has been defiantly connecting with the masses, first with her turn as the malevolent but unexpectedly vulnerable fashionatrix in "The Devil Wears Prada," and then as the single mother singing "Dancing Queen" in the ABBA musical "Mamma Mia!," which has so far raked in close to $600 million worldwide.