Meryl Streep is the latest actress to be linked to the proposed biopic of the Scottish singer Susan Boyle. According to the Guilty Pleasures section of the British tabloid Metro, Boyle announced the news herself.
“I wouldn’t like to be in the film myself,” she told the newspaper. “I’d like someone to play me. Probably Meryl Streep — I understand she has been approached.”
It is difficult to know how credible this report is. Although Streep’s virtuosity is unquestioned — she could probably play Danny Boyle— at 64 she is 12 years older than the singer, who became an overnight phenomenon after her audition on Simon Cowell’s “Britain’s Got Talent” on April 11, 2009. (It wouldn’t be a record — Norma Shearer had just turned 34 when MGM’s “Romeo and Juliet” was released, though, to be fair, no one was pretending her Juliet was 13.)
Catherine Zeta-Jones and Glenn Close had previously been linked to the project, though there was apparently no substance in the rumors. The soundest suggestion so far has been that Imelda Staunton should play Boyle. Joanna Scanlan, exceptional as the humiliated wife of Charles Dickens in “The Invisible Woman,” must be another contender.
Deadline reported a year ago that Fox Searchlight’s Lucas Webb acquired Boyle’s life rights and the rights to the British jukebox musical “I Dreamed a Dream,” which follows the singer from infancy through the onset of fame. Webb told Nancy Tartaglione that the plan was to make “a sensitive and honest biopic infused with music.”
The musical, based on Boyle’s autobiography, was produced by Michael Harrison. The book was co-written by Alan McHugh and the Scottish actress and comedienne Elaine C. Smith, who played Boyle in the 2012 production that toured the UK and Ireland.
“Sensitive” will be the way to go, as Webb suggests. Briefly deprived of oxygen during birth, Boyle suffered minor brain damage and had learning disabilities as a child. She was also bullied at school. Fragile and socially awkward, she was ill-equipped to deal with celebrity and was hospitalized after losing in the June 2009 finals of “Britain’s Got Talent.” She still lives in the modest West Lothian house where she was raised.
The mezzo-soprano’s overcoming of her personal obstacles to become a top recording artist (19 million album sales worldwide) was remarkable. It also challenged the expectation that women singers seeking a breakthrough must be young, slender, and conventionally beautiful. From the first, Boyle’s struggle to have her talent taken seriously elicited reactions that veered from the patronizing to the skeptical. The film will hopefully address this ugly standard.
