Meryl Streep: The Choice Between The Devil And The Dream
This week, as The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrives in cinemas, Meryl Streep finds herself once again in the public eye, returning at 76 to a role she first played twenty years ago. It is a fitting moment to revisit a much older piece of advice she once gave, long before any of the recognition that now surrounds her.
Meryl Streep: "Integrate what you believe into every single area of your life. Take your heart to work, and ask the most and best of everybody else too. Don't let your special character and values, the truth you know deep down, get swallowed up by complacency."
The Discipline She Was Naming
Streep delivered these words at Vassar College in 1983, near the beginning of her career and well before its summit. The full address frames the idea as a daily choice between, in her phrase, the devil and the dream. She was describing the steady, unglamorous discipline of refusing to let one's values become decorative. Heart at work, in her telling, has little to do with sentimentality. It is the demand that what you believe outside the office shows up inside it, and that the people around you are held to the same standard.
Integrity Across The Whole Of A Life
What gives Streep's words their weight is the word integrate. She is asking for something more demanding than holding to one's values when they are tested. She is asking that the values run through every setting a person occupies, so that the version of them at work is recognisably the same as the version of them at home, with friends, in the choices that nobody is watching. The complacency she warns against is the gradual separation of these versions, the quiet permission to be one kind of person in one place and another kind elsewhere.
Streep's challenge resonates with the Laidlaw value of being #Ambitious, in the sense of holding oneself and others to a standard that does not slip when convenient, and with the Oxford Character Project virtue of #Integrity, which describes precisely this wholeness across the different parts of a life.
A Call To Reflect
We invite you to sit with Streep's challenge this week. What would it look like to live and work with greater integrity, letting more of what you believe shape the work you are already doing?