Golden Globes 2012: Meryl Streep thanked England for letting her “trample all over history” with her Golden Globe-winning performance in The Iron Lady.
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Meryl Streep with her Golden Globe award for Best Performance by an Actress in The Iron Lady Photo: EPA/PAUL BUCK
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By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor
In a widely predicted win, Meryl Streep picked up the best actress in a drama award for her role as Baroness Thatcher. But she faced accusations of ungracious behaviour when she failed to mention the former Prime Minister in her lengthy acceptance speech at the Los Angeles ceremony. The 62-year-old actress thanked many others including her fellow nominees, the cast and crew of the film, and Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul who distributed The Iron Lady and to whom she jokingly referred as “God”.
The film ended and I sat motionless while the credits rolled. Slowly I got up and walked out into the cold January air, sickened by what I’d been party to, so acutely aware that the scenes presented as entertainment and edification – scenes I’d paid to see – were, at that very moment, possibly taking place in a grand house somewhere in central London. I had partaken of cruel, thoughtless voyeurism, the subject of which was powerless to protest at her exploitation.
There was never any doubt that The Iron Lady would be a controversial film. The mere mention of Margaret Thatcher, despite her leaving office over two decades ago, still divides the nation as it did when she was Prime Minister. Since its release last Friday, the movie has played to packed audiences, taking £2.2 million in its opening weekend and reaching number 1 at the UK box office.
Yet it has also attracted protests and pickets, as well as accusations from those who remain hostile to her premiership that it portrays Lady Thatcher in a forgiving light.
My anger at the film has nothing to do with politics. I don’t object to the artistic licence exercised over certain events or the way Lady Thatcher’s political life is portrayed. My issue is with the portrayal of how she is now. And I suspect that those who have seen the film will feel the same.
While Meryl Streep’s performance is mesmerising, it is impossible not to be disturbed by her depiction of Lady Thatcher’s decline into dementia. Columnists and commentators such as Charles Moore, Norman Tebbit and Douglas Hurd have opined in this newspaper and elsewhere about this distasteful approach. And David Cameron has similarly questioned the morality of making the film while she is still alive. I did not expect to agree with them. But now I am even more vehement in my condemnation, because, as a doctor, I have direct experience of the reality of dementia for the sufferer and their family.
The film is based in the present day and features flashbacks to Lady Thatcher’s early life, her rise to power and the defining events of her premiership and downfall. But from the opening scene, where a confused and befuddled Lady Thatcher wanders into a corner shop to buy a pint of milk, I began to feel uncomfortable. As I watched scene after scene showing this once all-powerful woman as old, bewildered and scared, my discomfort turned to rage.
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| Outstanding: Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady Photo: FILM STILLS |
In one vignette, she is hosting a dinner party at her Belgravia home, clearly confused as to who is present, muddled in her thinking and humiliated as she struggles with names and battles to keep up with the conversation. There is a flash of the old Mrs Thatcher and her mastery of argument – then it is gone. In another poignant scene, she scuttles around her flat, turning on electrical appliances in an attempt to drown out the sound of the “voice” of her long-dead husband Denis, which torments her constantly. She peers furtively around doors to overhear people discussing her deterioration.
In my work in caring for the elderly, I have treated many older people with dementia. The way Streep captures this is outstandingly accurate. Anyone who has cared for someone with Alzheimer’s, for example, will recognise the waxing and waning confusion; the way in which sufferers appear to slip into another world, their loss of a sense of time, the way they look at you utterly perplexed in stark contrast to rare moments of startling clarity and insight – all the things that make this disease so cruel and tragic. The film is faultless in its depiction of dementia.
But to show someone in the throes of an illness while they are actually experiencing it and in terminal decline is chillingly insensitive. Can you imagine an unauthorised film being made about the life of a public figure who was dying of cancer, for example – Christopher Hitchens, say – before his death? Can you imagine watching scenes that his family opposed – showing him writhing in agony, weak and vulnerable? Of course not. There would be a furious outcry. It would rightly be considered a terrible violation of that person’s privacy, and in appalling poor taste.
So how are the scenes that show Lady Thatcher battling with dementia any different? Whether the portrayal of her as an old lady is sympathetic and kindly or not is irrelevant. It dramatises highly personal and deeply tragic aspects of someone’s life while they are still experiencing it.
I never imagined I would ever leap to the defence of Margaret Thatcher. I am a child of the Thatcher era but no Thatcherite. In the Eighties, my father lost his job as a milkman and joined the ranks of the unemployed. Times were hard and I remember vividly the loathing my parents felt towards her and her government. They actively supported the miners’ strikes and I have fond memories of visiting Barnsley and sitting on a miner’s knee while my parents were taken on an informal tour of the pits.
I remember the graffiti daubed on walls near our home after the poll tax riots. I remember going on marches and protests with my mother and chanting the old soubriquet “Thatcher, Thatcher milk-snatcher”. I also remember the day in 1990 when Lady Thatcher left office and a music teacher burst into our classroom, unable to conceal her delight.
Margaret Thatcher was a pantomime-ish villain of my childhood. Since then, I have developed a more circumspect view of her time in power, and a grudging respect.
I still loathe the insidious selfishness that crept into the collective consciousness under her premiership and that is so pervasive now. But I also think it’s all too easy to vilify a powerful, determined, forthright and ambitious woman as an ogre, blaming her for society’s ills in a way that would never happen to a man in public office. She was dedicated to public service, with a strong sense of social responsibility and duty. While I might not agree with her solutions to the serious problems this country faced in the early Eighties, at least she believed passionately that what she was doing was for the greater good. Surely her astonishing political journey from grocer’s daughter to Downing Street is worthy enough of the Hollywood treatment, without focusing on her descent into dementia?
Whatever one’s feelings about Lady Thatcher’s legacy, The Iron Lady is a disgraceful film. You do not have to support her politics to defend her right to privacy in old age. She deserves to be treated with as much dignity as anyone else. This is precisely what the film, in depicting her in the grip of dementia while she is still alive, fails to do.
I do not know how impaired Lady Thatcher is, if she really hallucinates and sees her dead husband or has ever slipped past her minders to wander aimlessly to the shops, confused and alone. But I do hope she never sees this film or reads the reviews. No wonder her children, Mark and Carol, refused to attend private screenings.
Watch this film without knowledge of the background and you’d assume Margaret Thatcher had already died. This is what angered me most about The Iron Lady. It is representative of how society largely views elderly people, particularly those with dementia. They are ignored. They are considered to be dead long before they actually are. Those with dementia experience a loss, not just of their memory and cognition, but of respect and dignity.
Sociologists talk of “social death” and “biological death”. Ideally, the two coincide, but in dementia, there is discordance. As people with dementia decline, they are no longer deemed worthy of attention or thought. As far as society is concerned, they are already history. This film gets away with treating Lady Thatcher as though she were already dead, because that’s precisely how society behaves towards the old and infirm. This is lamentable, vile and shameful – and it should anger every one of us.
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2012
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2012
