There’s no business like show business. And given that screen legend Meryl Streep says she once missed out on a massive movie role for being “ugly”, I’m not sure I’m interested in any operation like it.
The star revealed on The Graham Norton Show back in 2015 that she missed out on a huge role in 1976′s King Kong remake because of her looks.
The son of the film’s director Dino De Laurentiis had seen Meryl in a play and took her to meet his father.
“He had this amazing office that looked all over Manhattan,” she explained.
“I walked in and his son was sitting there, very excited that he’d brought in this new actress. And the father said to his son in Italian, because I understand Italian, he said, ‘che brutta’, you know, ‘why do you bring me this ugly thing?’.”
The now 21-time Oscar nominee seemed to handle it expertly though.
While she called the experience “sobering” as a “young girl”, she added that she quickly responded to the director in Italian.
“I said to him… I understand what you’re saying, I’m sorry I’m not beautiful enough to be in King Kong,” she joked.
In case you’re wondering, the role of Dwan in the 1976 movie ended up going to Jessica Lange.
Speaking at Indiana University Bloomington in 2014, Meryl said she thought she was “too ugly to be an actress” when she was a student.
“I was always in plays, but I thought it was vain to be an actress. Plus, I thought I was too ugly to be an actress. Glasses weren’t fabulous then,” she explained.
Still, she seems to have moved on from those early worries.
“For young women, I would say, don’t worry so much about your weight,” she advised the graduating students.
“Girls spend way too much time thinking about that, and there are better things. For young men and women too, what makes you different or weird, that’s your strength… I used to hate my nose. Now I don’t. It’s OK.”
“I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work,” she told Vogue in 2002.
“For an actress, worrying about appearance is a horrible, horrible trap. It’s great for acting to be unconscious of how you look and to be willing to mess up how you look, and see what that does to people.”
