‘I even enjoyed wearing the habit’

Meryl Streep, who plays a nun in the new film Doubt, speaks to Gabrielle Donnelly
19 December 2008

When Meryl Streep was researching the role of Sister Aloysius, the protagonist of John Patrick Shanley's film Doubt, a drama set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1963, one of the first things she did was to take herself to meet some real-life nuns who had been teaching at the time.

The experience, she tells me when we meet for tea in Beverly Hills, was something of an eye-opener.

"They were in their 80s and 90s, of course, and most of them sharp as a tack," she says now, smiling admiringly at the thought of the women she met. "The responsibility they had had at that time was just incredible. There was one nun who single-handedly ran the New York City parochial school system, which at the time had 70,000 kids in Brooklyn alone, and it was all her responsibility. the rest image