Meryl Streep played Margaret Thatcher in the critically acclaimed and commercially successful 2011 film ‘The Iron Lady’ and won an Oscar for her portrayal. And with yesterday’s passing of the UK’s first female Prime Minister, Streep has released a statement remembering the “Iron Lady.”
“Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer, willingly or unwillingly, for the role of women in politics,” she said in a release obtained by Huffington Post. “It is hard to imagine a part of our current history that has not been affected by measures she put forward in the UK at the end of the 20th century. Her hard-nosed fiscal measures took a toll on the poor, and her hands-off approach to financial regulation led to great wealth for others. There is an argument that her steadfast, almost emotional loyalty to the pound sterling has helped the UK weather the storms of European monetary uncertainty.
“But to me she was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class bound and gender phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement,” she added. “To have won it, not because she inherited the position as the daughter of a great man, or the widow of an important man, but by dint of her own striving. To have withstood the special hatred and ridicule, unprecedented in my opinion, leveled in our time at a public figure who was not a mass murderer; and to have managed to keep her convictions attached to fervent ideals and ideas — wrongheaded or misguided as we might see them now — without corruption.
“I see that as evidence of some kind of greatness, worthy for the argument of history to settle. To have given women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation; this was groundbreaking and admirable. I was honored to try to imagine her late life journey [in 2011’s The Iron Lady], after power; but I have only a glancing understanding of what her many struggles were, and how she managed to sail through to the other side. I wish to convey my respectful condolences to her family and many friends.”
Margaret Thatcher passed away on Monday, April 8th at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke. Thatcher rose from a working-class childhood to serve as the United Kingdom’s first female Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.
