She rode on her brother’s back wearing a beautiful antique dress from the movie. Whenever I think of the film, I think of their beautiful golden heads walking off into the beautiful African sunset.” She says home life in Connecticut has always taken precedence over career, which may account for the success of her 27-year marriage (her recipe is “goodwill and a willingness to bend and to shut up once in a while”), but also for the career lull when her children were younger.Streep grew up in an affluent suburb of New Jersey. Her father Harry worked for a pharmaceutical company, her mother Mary was a commercial artist From the start, Streep liked to be the centre of attention. “Let’s face it; we were all once three-year-olds who stood in the middle of the living room performing, while everyone thought we were so adorable. Only some of us grow up and get paid for it.”As a child, she would use eyebrow pencil to draw age lines on her face, pretending to be her grandmother, “to see what it would look like to get older” As a teenager, singing was a greater passion than acting. She apparently made a big impression in the school choir aged 12, and had ambitions to become an opera singer. At Vassar College, she started out studying music, but hated the theory (“It was all maths…”), switched to drama and completed her degree.

She auditioned at Yale’s drama school, delivering lines by Portia from The Merchant of Venice and Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire, and was immediately awarded a full scholarship. “I thought it was really fun, but I didn’t really think it was a serious way to conduct your life,” she says. “You know, I was a true child of the Sixties; we’d just come through Vietnam, Watergate, all of that, and I thought it would be ultimately self-indulgent to be an actor.”Despite her uncertainties, she moved to New York and took her first film role in Julia in 1977. The next year came The Deer Hunter, followed by Kramer vs Kramer and a string of box-office hits in the Eighties: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sophie’s Choice, Out of Africa, Plenty and Silkwood.These days, she doesn’t like to talk about acting technique, but she said years ago: “I have no idea how it really works and I don’t know how other people do it.

I see [Robert] De Niro writing in the margins of his script, but I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t question how do I do it and I don’t have ‘a method’.”She’s working with De Niro in First Man, a comedy in which she plays the US President, a step up from her ruthless Senator in 2004’s The Manchurian Candidate. “Women are very well suited to rule the world in future, because of the multitasking they do and their ability to be moving in 15 directions at once. It’s the women who behave like men, who focus in that singular way with the blinkers on, who have problems. I honestly think that if women were running the world there would be more investment in peace, because basically as women we do not want to see our children killed.”As for my prescription for peace in the Middle East?” She pauses, sighs “No, not today. Maybe I am completely idealistic, but until we see women in equal positions of power in the world, I just think that we are doomed.”Streep is known as an activist and environmentalist and has often talked of “doing something more worthwhile than acting” But she can’t seem to stop.

“Every time I think this is a silly way to spend my life, I see a performance by another actor and think, ‘I couldn’t live if I didn’t have this in my life.’”Her next film is Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, written by Garrison Keillor, host of the American radio show of that name She stars as a folk singer and single mother “It was really fun to sing I don’t get to do it much. At my house I’m not allowed to; your children can’t stand it when you sing.”Lindsay Lohan plays her teenage daughter. Of working with the gossip magazines’ favourite cover-star, she says: “Three of my children are older than she is, and I have a certain amount of sympathy for the fact that all the mistakes she makes are made in public and people make millions of dollars off those mistakes. I don’t know the pressures on these young women who are famous now, to open their lives to photographers.