With 16 Oscar nominations (two wins) and 25 Golden Globe nods (two wins), Meryl Streep has a resume no one in Hollywood can match. Seriously, she’s peerless. She can now add Vogue cover girl to her resume, too. Gracing the front of the January 2012 issue of the ultimate fashion bible, Streep dazzles at age 62 – making her the oldest cover model in the publication’s history. “I was joking with some of the ladies earlier,” Streep, promoting her predictably acclaimed turn as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady , tells the magazine. “I told them I was probably the oldest person ever to be on the cover of Vogue .” Streep, who played a version of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada , hasn’t just defied the odds and outdated limitations for women in Hollywood. With her legacy growing by the decade, she’s redefined them. When she turned 40, she said, “I remember turning to my husband [sculptor Don Gummer] and saying, ‘Well, what should we do? Because it’s over.'” The reason she thought that? Streep reveals that she received three offers to play witches in films as soon as she hit 40. “Once women passed childbearing age … they could only be seen as grotesque on some level,” she surmises, “as women whose usefulness had passed.” But different, and often richer roles have followed in spades. One recent example is her role in the middle-aged, post-divorce sex comedy It’s Complicated . “In the period of Silkwood (1983), It’s Complicated could never have been made, with a 60-year-old actress deciding between her ex-husband and another man.” “With a 40-year-old actress it would never have been made!” she says. She was thrilled to play British prime minister Thatcher, despite significant political differences with the leader: “With any character I play, where she is me is where I meet her. It’s very easy to set people at arm’s length and judge them,” she explains. “Yes, you can judge the policies and the actions … but to live inside that body is another thing entirely. It’s humbling and infuriating, just like it is to live in your own body.” “Because you recognize your own failings, and I have no doubt that she recognized hers.”
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Meryl Streep Covers Vogue at Age 62
