http://www.npr.org/2012/02/06/146362798/meryl-streep-the-fresh-air-interview

This interview reminds me of what an inspiration Meryl Streep is to me:  how she has forged her own way through middle age in the limelight of celebrity and movie making.  Even though I wasn’t offered the role of “witches” when I was in my forties – I remember the feeling that the only thing left for me was getting old.  And that didn’t seem very powerful.  Now I know better.  (At least I’m trying to know better.)

On the roles she was offered in her 40s and 50s

 “I remember when I turned 40, I was offered, within one year, three different witch roles. To play three different witches in three different contexts. It was almost like the world was saying or the studios were saying, ‘We don’t know what to do with you.’ … I think there was, for a long time in the movie business, a period of — when a woman was attractive and marriageable or f- – -able, that was it. And then they didn’t know what to do with you until you were the lioness in winter, until you were 70, and then it was OK to do Driving Miss Daisy … [and] things like that. But that middle period — the most vibrant of a woman’s life, arguably, from 40 to 60, no one knew what to do with them. That really has changed, not completely, not for everybody, but for me it has changed. Part of it has to do with, I wasn’t that word that I just said that you bleeped before; when I was a younger actress, that wasn’t the first thing about me.”