Meryl Streep Character Quotations

I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.

If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.

For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.

On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies.

In other characters, it's driven by insecurity, or it's driven by fear, or - there's always a driver. And all the physical manifestations, you need your way in.

For me, clothes are kind of a character. They're more interesting in those terms.

You know, you're not aware of it, but you're following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist, you know? You feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses. And I think I just took it for granted that, you know, we can all do that, but it became obvious to me that men don't live through the female characters.

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.

I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long.

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.

I never give any character I play less respect than I give my own life.

How do I do that preparation [for film]? Just an immersion. I have a musician's, I guess, ear for the sound of the voice but it's also important to me, in the case of [playing] someone who is controversial, to get the outlines of the character right because how they present themselves to the world has a great deal to do with how people feel about them.

And it interferes with your ability to be a good actress if you're constantly aware of yourself as a person. To me, it isn't valuable to think about how I'm coming off all the time if I'm trying to create a character, because that's a process that I love. It's like falling in love and surrendering to another person or a character.

The best thing about acting is when you're playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That's when you know you've been succeeded at what you've worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments.