The Perils of Meryl

Just as Streep began riding the rapids in June 1993, gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote that the actress had chosen The River Wild as an action vehicle to pump up her sagging box office appeal. Streep, who claims she's too old to worry about creating a new image, is irked by Smith's presumption. "It wasn't true, but there is no way I can respond to it without seeming defensive," she says. "If you look at the parts for women my age, no, I'm not going to turn that one down. I didn't pick it because I thought it would be popular."

Why then? "I don't want to discourage anyone from seeing the movie who thinks it's just an action-adventure, but it really has a lot of other things going on, and that's what drew my attention."

The River Wild puts Gail, her husband, and their son on a vacation meant to mend their unraveling family — both mother and son have just about given up on Strathairn's inattentive Tom, and Bacon's mystery man offers an inviting counterpoint. "Like The Fugitive, this is an action picture that's character-driven," Streep observes. "It's not black and white. The bad guys, they're not Dolph Lundgren, they're attractive. And the good guys — you don't really love this warring couple in the beginning. They have their problems."

The actress and her character share similarities — both are 40ish mothers, evidently disciplined — but Streep doesn't work from the outside in. "I'm not very self-analytical," she says. "I get into a character ... then I find out, 'Oh, that's why (I) wanted to do this.' It's cultivated unconsciousness."

"She's past the analyzing of the character," says Redford. "Her training and her experience have taken her to a point where she can be effortless with a lot of things other people have to work really hard at."

At the end of the production, when the other actors were gone, Hanson needed to film some additional close-ups of his star. He set up a raft on some rocks on the shore. With nothing around to help her get back into character, he watched as her face subtly, and instantly, became Gail's. "I said, 'How do you do that?'" says Hanson. "She laughed. 'Curtis, I don't know. I've never known.'"

Streep isn't the kind of actress who takes her work home with her. How else could she find her role as a guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice her most enjoyable work experience? "She doesn't dream about her roles or start sobbing at the table. She's a very sane person," says Carrie Fisher, who got to be a close friend while Streep filmed Fisher's Postcards From the Edge. "Work is work and family is family. And family is her priority."

Nor was becoming a public figure what Streep bargained for when she started performing in her high school's musicals (in Bernardsville, N.J.) and later became a star at Vassar College and the Yale School of Drama. Over the years, she has given relatively few interviews and learned to contain what Fisher calls a naturally talkative streak. Asked if she's made her peace with being a celebrity, Streep says she's had no choice. Then, thinking again, she admits that no, she hasn't. "I'm going to go down fighting," she says.

People who might interfere with her focus can get the bum's rush. A camera crew shooting publicity material for The River Wild was banished from the location when it started filming her performance after being warned not to. On another occasion, while watching an intimate campfire scene, a reporter was tapped on the shoulder and asked to leave.

"When you're being watched unnaturally you feel it, if you're a sensitive person. Who knows what this delicate thing is that actors are making? So if that's diva behavior, sorry," says the actress, who adds, "I don't have handlers. I do have a longtime makeup man and hairdresser who performs the scourge role in my on-set life and keeps people away."

Living above the Serengeti plain while filming Out of Africa a decade ago prompted Streep and her young family to abandon Manhattan for rural Connecticut, and though she recently tried living in Los Angeles, it's back east, in the country, where she feels at home. True, her telephone company still uses rotary dialing and her satellite dish (there is no cable) was struck by lightning 12 times last year, but "every time it's out," she says, "I'm beside myself with joy."

The quiet life has always agreed with her. Mary Louise Streep grew up in suburban Summit, N.J., in the '50s, the daughter of a pharmaceutical- company executive and a commercial artist. "When I was in high school and I was in a car with a boy and he was driving real, real fast, there was never an ounce of enjoyment of the thrill," she says, shaking her head. "Part of it is that I've always felt older. I've always felt about 40 (and) I did have this moment when I turned 40 that I felt like my clothes finally fit and I didn't have to be anything other than myself."

As her oldest kids enter their teen years, Streep claims to want to work less. "I have so many children that it's very hard to pay attention to them and work," she sighs. "Now I have difficulty tuning in the professional side. The other side is louder and more insistent."

Early next year, following The Bridges of Madison County, she'll star with Liam Neeson in Before and After, based on Rosellen Brown's wrenching best-selling novel about a couple (she a doctor, he a sculptor) who struggle to keep their family together after a son is charged with murder. After that, her plans are indefinite, and she leaves her working pace to fate. "You're limited by the number of scripts you're appropriate for in a year. There are not 27, there are not 7. Sometimes there are none," says Streep, who finds the idea of forming her own production company "too fraught with politics, a lot of people, one-upmanship. "Most of the women in movies are sex objects," she continues, "what my father calls 'scantily clad,' and they are there to be dumped, humped, maimed, or killed — a victim or an appendage. I always say to my kids, 'Read, read — why don't you read?' All the conflicted, interesting characters are in literature."

And Meryl Streep movies.