Meryl, Maggie and me

Director Phyllida Lloyd on Meryl Streep’s eerily accurate portrayal of the Iron Lady

Maybe she’s lost interest. Perhaps she’s just knackered. Almost certainly she’s had a bellyful of listening to herself talking about her film, The Iron Lady. When I meet Phyllida Lloyd, who also directed the 2008 smash hit, Mamma Mia, I’m expecting to find the sparkling quintessence of Hellenic romance and frivolity. But she’s all in black, and all on her own, in the sort of under-lit room where freed hostages are debriefed. On the table sits a bit of half-finished lunch in a cardboard box. Next to it there’s a litre bottle of diet lemonade. As soon as I arrive she scoots out to grab a loo-break. It’s mid-afternoon and she’s been talking to hacks like me all day. Six more are circling the building ready to land as soon I create an opening. She returns and sits down with an air of cliff-like endurance. Her flattened blonde hair is cut into a square bob. No make-up. She’s wearing an overcoat.

The film is not, she insists, primarily political. ‘There were advisers making sure that the political threads were watertight,’ she says. But for her the story was ‘mystic or Shakespearean’, like grand opera. ‘A kind of King Lear about loneliness and loss. And about dealing with an absence of power on every level.’

The movie uses the endgame flashback device. We start with Lady Thatcher in her dotage, suffering hallucinations as she struggles to sort out her dead husband’s clothes. Her disintegrating mind takes us back through the key episodes in her career. ‘There’s nothing controversial about the bits of the political plot that we were showing,’ says Lloyd. ‘If we were trying to change people’s opinions it was more, perhaps, to have empathy for old people rather than to vote for David Cameron.