IF YOU'RE in the Comunidad Valenciana any time between now and the early hours of March 20, you may notice an awful lot of noise and colour on the streets. It's the season for the region's biggest festival,...
Meryl Streep for Princess of Asturias Award...and how Almodóvar fits in
30/04/2023
THIS year's Princess of Asturias Arts Award winner has already been announced after her name was put forward by Spain's most famous living film director.
Hollywood legend Meryl Streep will be presented with the national Spanish answer to a Nobel Prize this autumn after she was chosen from a shortlist of 44 candidates from 20 countries.
Known for her lead rôles as the scary magazine boss in The Devil Wears Prada, the mum of the bride in Mamma Mia and as the Danish coffee plantation owner in the film version of Karen Blixen's autobiographical novel Out of Africa, Ms Streep has won just about every award in existence – several times.
But you can only ever earn a Princess of Asturias Award once – and it helps if Pedro Almodóvar votes for you.
The prolific cult director also won the Arts prize in 2006, but back then, it was the Prince of Asturias Award.
Since June 2014, there has been no such person as the Prince of Asturias; until then, this was King Juan Carlos I's son Felipe, who became King Felipe VI after his father abdicated nine years ago.
And Felipe VI and his wife, Queen Letizia, have two daughters – their eldest, Leonor, is Princess of Asturias and first in line to the throne.
Her namesake awards are presented in the autumn, at around the time of her birthday – October 31 – and this year she will be celebrating her 18th either just before or just after the ceremony.
But award recipients are announced throughout the year, so they have plenty of time to work on their acceptance speeches.
From Yale to the Oscars via Broadway in four years
Meryl Streep – who will be 74 in June – has already netted three Oscars, eight Golden Globes, two BAFTAs and three Emmys after over 40 years in the acting profession, meaning the Princess of Asturias Award is one of the few missing from her trophy cabinet.
Highly-versatile Meryl started out in theatre, treading the boards in New York after graduating from Vassar College in 1971 and then Yale University Drama School in 1975.
One of her earliest Broadway productions was Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard in 1977, and it would only be another two years before she earned her first awards – a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Kramer vs Kramer.
Ms Streep – born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey - was being cast in leading rôles barely six years after finishing drama college, and scooping up awards for those, two: She earned a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for Best Lead Actress in 1981 for The French Lieutenant's Woman and repeated this laudable feat, with an Oscar in the same category, the following year with Sophie's Choice.
The star has proven herself in everything from light comedy to serious literary adaptations and historical dramas, with central parts in Isabel Allende's House of Spirits (1993), Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Marvin's Room (1996), Virginia Woolf's The Hours (2002), and played the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady in 2011 and women's votes activist Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette in 2015.
One of only four surviving 'triple-Oscar club' members
With almost a film a year since the beginning of the 1980s – her most recent being Don't Look Up in 2021, alongside Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo diCaprio – Meryl Streep holds the outright record for the highest number of Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, with 21 and 32 respectively, and is one of just two actresses alive today who has won more than two Oscars.
Although the late Katharine Hepburn is the only actor – male or female – to have won four Oscars, only six in total have won three, including the only two living male actors Daniel Day-Lewis and Jack Nicholson, and the late Walter Brennan and Ingrid Bergman.
Since the latter's death in 1982 and Ms Hepburn's passing in 2003, Meryl Streep and Frances McDormand are now jointly the female stars with the most Oscar awards to their names – three each.
But the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Arts will not be the first major Spanish prize Meryl has won – she was presented with the Donostia trophy for lifetime achievement at San Sebastián Film Festival in 2008.
Princess of Asturias Award winners receive a trophy designed by the late Catalunya-born modern art legend Joan Miró, a badge, a certificate, and €50,000 in cash.
For many winners, the money helps them continue in the activity that earned them the prize, or is simply a bonus source of income, depending upon their background, but for huge celebrities who earn several million with their latest works, €50,000 is not so life-changing and they are more likely to donate it to a charity or cause close to their hearts.
Streep-Almodóvar working partnership thwarted by language barrier
“Few actresses in the history of US film have so much versatility,” Pedro Almodóvar said of Meryl Streep when putting her name forward for this year's Princess of Asturias Arts Award.
“[She] is an actress of vast registers who excels in every genre – comedy, drama, musical, and so on.
“She does everything really well, really naturally and really believably.”
The long-running off-the-wall director has never actually worked with Meryl yet, however. She was tipped for a lead rôle in Julieta, one of a number of adaptations of Canadian author Alice Munro's short stories Almodóvar was working on in the early 2010s.
In fact, Meryl had accepted the part at first, but when it transpired Julieta would be filmed in Madrid and Galicia rather than Canada, and in Spanish rather than English, she realised she would not be able to do it.
“[Meryl] fully agreed and understood,” Almodóvar reveals.
“She was delighted with the idea, but I didn't feel confident at the time about producing and directing a film in the English language.
“I went home and shelved the idea. Then, two years later, I rescued the script and decided to film it in Spanish and in Spain.”
In the end, Julieta's main rôle went to both Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte, who each played the title character at different stages in her life.
“It would have been a very different film if Meryl Streep had been in it as originally planned,” the Castilla-La Mancha-born director confessed.
“In the end, our working together didn't go ahead, because of the language barrier. I need to be sure I really know my characters. I think I'd need to go and live abroad for six months before I could write English-speaking ones.”
That was then, this is now: Almodóvar's second English film due out
This was in 2016, but since then, Almodóvar has scripted and directed two productions in English – a short and a medium-length film.
One, his 'lockdown movie' The Human Voice, based upon the novella by Les Enfants Terribles' Jean Cocteau, featured just one cast member – British-Australian actress and former friend of Lady Diana Spencer, Tilda Swinton.
It was presented at Venice Film Festival in 2020, and would be followed up by the cowboy romance Strange Way of Life (Extraña Forma de Vida), starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.
Also in English, it will be unveiled at Cannes this year and then will hit cinemas in Spain on May 26.
As yet, it is not clear whether Almodóvar's new project Manual for Cleaning Women, reportedly starring another Australian legend – Cate Blanchett – will be in English, Spanish or both, although the production, based upon the anthology of short stories by Lucía Berlín, will be filmed in Spain.
Almodóvar said the scenes in the written version of the stories based in México will be reworked and set in his home country instead.
Now the legendary director has proposed Meryl Streep for a Princess of Asturias Award, speculation is likely to be rife about whether he will seek her out if he decides to continue his newly-hewn path of English-language film-making.
She might not be the only candidate, either – British silver-screen stalwart Emma Thompson (Love, Actually; Remains of the Day; Nanny McPhee; Saving Mr Banks; Sense and Sensibility) publicly stated several years ago that she would 'love to' become an 'Almodóvar Girl' one day.
Related Topics
THIS year's Princess of Asturias Arts Award winner has already been announced after her name was put forward by Spain's most famous living film director.
Hollywood legend Meryl Streep will be presented with the national Spanish answer to a Nobel Prize this autumn after she was chosen from a shortlist of 44 candidates from 20 countries.
Known for her lead rôles as the scary magazine boss in The Devil Wears Prada, the mum of the bride in Mamma Mia and as the Danish coffee plantation owner in the film version of Karen Blixen's autobiographical novel Out of Africa, Ms Streep has won just about every award in existence – several times.
But you can only ever earn a Princess of Asturias Award once – and it helps if Pedro Almodóvar votes for you.
The prolific cult director also won the Arts prize in 2006, but back then, it was the Prince of Asturias Award.
Since June 2014, there has been no such person as the Prince of Asturias; until then, this was King Juan Carlos I's son Felipe, who became King Felipe VI after his father abdicated nine years ago.
And Felipe VI and his wife, Queen Letizia, have two daughters – their eldest, Leonor, is Princess of Asturias and first in line to the throne.
Her namesake awards are presented in the autumn, at around the time of her birthday – October 31 – and this year she will be celebrating her 18th either just before or just after the ceremony.
But award recipients are announced throughout the year, so they have plenty of time to work on their acceptance speeches.
From Yale to the Oscars via Broadway in four years
Meryl Streep – who will be 74 in June – has already netted three Oscars, eight Golden Globes, two BAFTAs and three Emmys after over 40 years in the acting profession, meaning the Princess of Asturias Award is one of the few missing from her trophy cabinet.
Highly-versatile Meryl started out in theatre, treading the boards in New York after graduating from Vassar College in 1971 and then Yale University Drama School in 1975.
One of her earliest Broadway productions was Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard in 1977, and it would only be another two years before she earned her first awards – a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Kramer vs Kramer.
Ms Streep – born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey - was being cast in leading rôles barely six years after finishing drama college, and scooping up awards for those, two: She earned a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for Best Lead Actress in 1981 for The French Lieutenant's Woman and repeated this laudable feat, with an Oscar in the same category, the following year with Sophie's Choice.
The star has proven herself in everything from light comedy to serious literary adaptations and historical dramas, with central parts in Isabel Allende's House of Spirits (1993), Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Marvin's Room (1996), Virginia Woolf's The Hours (2002), and played the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady in 2011 and women's votes activist Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette in 2015.
One of only four surviving 'triple-Oscar club' members
With almost a film a year since the beginning of the 1980s – her most recent being Don't Look Up in 2021, alongside Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo diCaprio – Meryl Streep holds the outright record for the highest number of Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, with 21 and 32 respectively, and is one of just two actresses alive today who has won more than two Oscars.
Although the late Katharine Hepburn is the only actor – male or female – to have won four Oscars, only six in total have won three, including the only two living male actors Daniel Day-Lewis and Jack Nicholson, and the late Walter Brennan and Ingrid Bergman.
Since the latter's death in 1982 and Ms Hepburn's passing in 2003, Meryl Streep and Frances McDormand are now jointly the female stars with the most Oscar awards to their names – three each.
But the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Arts will not be the first major Spanish prize Meryl has won – she was presented with the Donostia trophy for lifetime achievement at San Sebastián Film Festival in 2008.
Princess of Asturias Award winners receive a trophy designed by the late Catalunya-born modern art legend Joan Miró, a badge, a certificate, and €50,000 in cash.
For many winners, the money helps them continue in the activity that earned them the prize, or is simply a bonus source of income, depending upon their background, but for huge celebrities who earn several million with their latest works, €50,000 is not so life-changing and they are more likely to donate it to a charity or cause close to their hearts.
Streep-Almodóvar working partnership thwarted by language barrier
“Few actresses in the history of US film have so much versatility,” Pedro Almodóvar said of Meryl Streep when putting her name forward for this year's Princess of Asturias Arts Award.
“[She] is an actress of vast registers who excels in every genre – comedy, drama, musical, and so on.
“She does everything really well, really naturally and really believably.”
The long-running off-the-wall director has never actually worked with Meryl yet, however. She was tipped for a lead rôle in Julieta, one of a number of adaptations of Canadian author Alice Munro's short stories Almodóvar was working on in the early 2010s.
In fact, Meryl had accepted the part at first, but when it transpired Julieta would be filmed in Madrid and Galicia rather than Canada, and in Spanish rather than English, she realised she would not be able to do it.
“[Meryl] fully agreed and understood,” Almodóvar reveals.
“She was delighted with the idea, but I didn't feel confident at the time about producing and directing a film in the English language.
“I went home and shelved the idea. Then, two years later, I rescued the script and decided to film it in Spanish and in Spain.”
In the end, Julieta's main rôle went to both Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte, who each played the title character at different stages in her life.
“It would have been a very different film if Meryl Streep had been in it as originally planned,” the Castilla-La Mancha-born director confessed.
“In the end, our working together didn't go ahead, because of the language barrier. I need to be sure I really know my characters. I think I'd need to go and live abroad for six months before I could write English-speaking ones.”
That was then, this is now: Almodóvar's second English film due out
This was in 2016, but since then, Almodóvar has scripted and directed two productions in English – a short and a medium-length film.
One, his 'lockdown movie' The Human Voice, based upon the novella by Les Enfants Terribles' Jean Cocteau, featured just one cast member – British-Australian actress and former friend of Lady Diana Spencer, Tilda Swinton.
It was presented at Venice Film Festival in 2020, and would be followed up by the cowboy romance Strange Way of Life (Extraña Forma de Vida), starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.
Also in English, it will be unveiled at Cannes this year and then will hit cinemas in Spain on May 26.
As yet, it is not clear whether Almodóvar's new project Manual for Cleaning Women, reportedly starring another Australian legend – Cate Blanchett – will be in English, Spanish or both, although the production, based upon the anthology of short stories by Lucía Berlín, will be filmed in Spain.
Almodóvar said the scenes in the written version of the stories based in México will be reworked and set in his home country instead.
Now the legendary director has proposed Meryl Streep for a Princess of Asturias Award, speculation is likely to be rife about whether he will seek her out if he decides to continue his newly-hewn path of English-language film-making.
She might not be the only candidate, either – British silver-screen stalwart Emma Thompson (Love, Actually; Remains of the Day; Nanny McPhee; Saving Mr Banks; Sense and Sensibility) publicly stated several years ago that she would 'love to' become an 'Almodóvar Girl' one day.
Related Topics
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