“I didn’t want the filming to end”: Meryl Streep on her favorite movie scen

Meryl Streep is enjoying her stay on the French Riviera, where the 77th Cannes Film Festival is currently taking place. The 74-year-old three-time Oscar winner has already been awarded an honorary Palme d'Or for her contribution to cinema, she attended several premieres, and spoke with Variety backstage and talked about her favorite film scene in her long career. It turned out that she got great pleasure from working on Sydney Pollack's 1985 film, Out of Africa.

In the epic romantic drama, Streep played Danish Baroness Karen, who falls in love with veteran hunter Denis (Robert Redford) while in colonial South Africa. In one episode, Denis gently washes Karen's head on the river, quoting a passage from Samuel Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." "It's a sexy scene in the sense that it's very intimate," the actress explained. “Now we see so many scenes of people sleeping with each other, but we don’t see this loving relationship that is so moving.”

However, according to Streep, the filming of the scene itself was not as pleasant as it might seem at first glance. The producers warned the actors to be wary of wild animals that were nearby. “We had lions, they were brought from California. They thought that there would be no problems with them because they were tamed, but no, Meryl added. -But the most dangerous were the hippopotamuses. Those who found themselves in the water next to them had no chance; many people died from these animals in Africa. And when we were filming on the river, the hippos were nearby. I don’t know if they can be seen in the film, I don’t remember, but I felt their presence.”

Redford was probably even more concerned about safety than Streep. At first, he couldn’t even muster the strength to wash his partner’s hair properly. “It wasn’t very good,” Meryl admitted. To demonstrate the correct example, the actress's stylist, Roy Helland, had to be called to the set. He still washes her hair, and according to Streep, "it's the best part of my day." “Robert learned his lesson, dove right into it, and yes, he was very good,” the actress noted with a smile. “After the fifth take, I fell head over heels in love and wanted the day to never end, even despite the proximity of the hippos.”

The basis for the script “Out of Africa” was Karen Blixen’s 1937 autobiographical book of the same name. The film grossed an impressive $128 million against a budget of $31 million and won 7 Oscars. For her work on the film, Meryl Streep received one of the many nominations for the prestigious Academy Award.