No thank you.’ Then I stop dead.” She spreads her fingers, commanding an eerie silence. “And I realise that someone, somewhere, is saying that about me.”In a long career, the trick is to keep it kicking,” she tells me, toying with the blonde bangs that have escaped their clips. Recent projects have put this vague advice into practice: she brought crackling sexual tension to the role of a bored mum shooting the rapids in The River Wild (1994), while her romance with a snaggle-toothed orchid poacher in Adaptation (2002) was as touching and sensual as it was unlikely. Add to these her recent multi-way role (playing a rabbi, the mother of an Aids victim, and Ethel Rosenberg) in her friend Mike Nichols’ television version of Angels in America, alongside The Manchurian Candidate and a cameo in the forthcoming Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events and you have a CV of versatility and eclecticism.She thinks it’s hilarious that I assumed there was a strategy behind these choices “No!” she booms. “What determines the films I do is the quality of the scripts Working with people I like School holidays.

Everyone thinks there’s a strategy because we’re all paranoid We think: ‘A-ha Very clever.’ Well, no, not really. With The River Wild, it was nothing deeper than the fact that we were living in LA when the chance came up to do a movie in Montana, by a river, in the open air, with Curtis Hanson. Did I want to? Yes! Was there anything else to do? No!”The impression you get is that Streep is out to correct a widely-held misapprehension about herself – that she is all technique and no spontaneity. The critic Pauline Kael never missed an opportunity to accuse her of being an automaton.

Kael decided in her review of Plenty (1985) that Streep “just isn’t there.. She’s strictly at interpreter”. And in Silkwood, she pointed to a moment when Streep bites a ham sandwich: “Streep imitates raunchiness meticulously… But she hasn’t got the craving to take that bite.” I wish that Kael were alive today to see the effortless fizz that Streep put into Adaptation and Angels in America. Or to hear that she has signed up to work with Robert Altman, that pioneer of footloose film-making.”Journalists always say to me, ‘Is there a through-line to the characters you play?’ That kills me. If there is a through-line, then it’s down to the culture, and what gets green-lit, and which roles are available. If you track that back to the people who make the decisions to make the movies, then maybe you’ll find a trend.

But it doesn’t rest with me.”She favours those directors who share her easygoing approach “Looseness is the key for me – or the illusion of looseness Actors are just babies at playtime I want to have fun. I want to get a really good scene down, go to lunch, come back and do another really good scene.”Before I can stop her, she is bombarding me with proof that she is not the regimented acting machine that she was once accused of being. So devoid is she of controlling tendencies that she doesn’t even view dailies anymore “I used to Dailies were my reward at the end of the day Now a Martini is reward enough Maybe I’m just more confident. I used to have to check that my performance was OK – check that it was alive, that it breathed, that it was fully human.” She is laughing at herself now.