Alison Jones meets Oscar nominee Meryl Streep.

------------------------------

It has been quite a year for Meryl Streep.

The actress, who turns 60 in June, achieved global cinematic domination in Mamma Mia, the film that finally sank Titanic as the highest grossing movie at the UK box office and which has taken more than half a billion dollars worldwide.

She received her 15th Oscar nomination for Doubt, with, it seems, only Kate Winslet between her and a third win.

Coincidently both of Streep’s movies started life on stage. The first was just a loose excuse to thread together some Abba songs. Doubt is a more cerebral drama. It is directed by John Patrick Shanley from his Pulitzer prize-winning play which premiered off-Broadway in 2004 and starred Cherry Jones, who won a Tony for her efforts.

“I thought she gave the definitive performance,” says Streep. “I thought it was a great, great play but I never thought it was going to be made into a movie. When John said let’s have lunch and talk about it my first thought was for Cherry, why isn’t she doing it?

“John explained that apart from the financial consideration there was the fact he had not directed that production and he needed his own hands on this. And I thought ‘I’d sure like a crack at that Sister Aloysius’.”

Though it has escaped its stage confines, the film barely expands beyond the perimeters of the Catholic school and convent in the Bronx where it is set, Meanwhile the winds of change are blowing outside (quite literally as the special effects team conjure up symbolic window-rattling gales).

The year is 1964. Kennedy is dead and the civil rights movement is gradually gathering strength.

There are radical shifts in the church following Vatican II (the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican) when the Pope encouraged priests to bond more with parishioners and for the nuns to forgo habits and be more ­accessible.

Streep plays Sister Aloysius, an old school nun who believes in instilling discipline through fear and regards the use of ballpoints instead of fountain pens as a sign standards are irrevocably crumbling.

She is suspicious of the liberal approach of the charismatic young priest, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

When he starts to show what she believes is an unhealthy interest in a young boy, the school’s only black pupil, she determines to force him out. With no concrete evidence and no admission from the boy, what follows is a series of blistering confrontations between priest and nun as she tries to get him to confess.

“In a great script, when the argument is so densely and tightly knit you think there is not an inch for me to give anything, but actually there was,” she says. “John ­allowed there to be breath in the scenes and in the pauses. The places where just the atmosphere takes over were very important.”

Shanley attended a Catholic school and his characters have been inspired by the nuns who taught him.

The naive Sister James (Amy Adams) is based on his first grade teacher, Sister Mary Margaret, who acted as the film’s consultant.

“She is 71 now,” recalls Streep. “She was a font of information. I visited the retirement home and had a couple of meals with the nuns and they were really great.

“Retirement homes are not usually happy places but these were. They were filled with people who were happy. They were with their sisters, they were all productively engaged in some kind of work, they were still tutoring kids, they were visiting the ­bereaved, they were in the communities.”

Streep said she recalled being similarly influenced by women teachers when growing up, when she actually benefitted from the glass ceiling that existed.

“They were really smart, interesting women. As an ambitious woman at that time you could be a nurse or a teacher. You could run a hairdressing salon.

“If you were extremely entrepreneurial you could have your own boutique business selling women’s products.

“But you couldn’t rise in publishing, or law, or become a doctor.

“So, due to the limitation of their horizons, these women taught, otherwise they would have been running corporations.”

But while on set in the convent school she discovered that not everyone was overawed by her presence.

“Kids aren’t impressed by anything.

“All they wanted to talk about was The Devil Wears Prada because they’d all seen that.

“But I didn’t really want to talk about that while I was wearing a habit.”