Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford on break from filming Gilda, 1946
“I’d be really upset if my life changed, if everyone stopped me on the street,” says Streep, a Nordic-Dutch beauty whose looks and manner suggest a wisecracking milkmaid. Keeping her anonymity will be a problem; one of New York’s reigning stage actresses after only three years in the city, Streep is now on a formidable movie streak. “The day after the Emmys,” she says, “someone came to me in Bloomingdale’s and said ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like Meryl what’s-her-name?’ I said, ‘No, nobody ever did, but thanks anyway.”
Meryl Streep in 1978
Actually, I’m from Mars. It’s fine if you don’t believe me, but that’s where I’m from. I’m a full-blooded martian. Don’t worry, there’s no plot to take over Earth. We’re just displaced. I can tell you don’t believe me. That’s okay. We’re a big secret; they even tried to hide it from me. That man— my father —told me a story I was born in a concentration camp, but you know that’s impossible. And I never met my mother because she supposedly died there. That’s convenient. Next thing I know, Morris there finds me in a swedish orphanage. I was five. I remember it. And then I got this one communication, a simple order. Stay where you are.
