THE HOURS and MERYL STREEP
Complete the word family table
| Adjective |
Noun |
Adverb |
| prominent |
|
prominently |
|
currency |
|
|
|
preparedly |
| emotional |
|
|
| connected |
|
- |
|
involvement |
- |
| expectable |
|
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In THE HOURS, the stories of Virginia Woolf in 1920s England, and Laura Brown in 1949 suburban Los Angeles, culminate in the contemporary urban tale of Clarissa Vaughan in 1990s Greenwich Village, New York. Meryl Streep plays Clarissa, a literary editor who is followed for one climactic day during which she plans a party for he long-time friend and one-time lover, a prominent writer dying of AIDS. In the midst of her preparations, Clarissa finds herself facing issues of time, freedom, love and letting go of the past.
The character of Clarissa it the only one of the main heroines in THE HOURS who lives in our current lifestyle, in an unconventional family structure, with a very contemporary lifestyle, something that also interested Streep. "Clarissa has very complicated relationships. She has her lover, Sally, but she´s also involved emotionally with an old lover of hers, a man who is dying of AIDS, and to whom she still feels strongly connected. I think she like many women today who feel like their life took a turn at some point and they don´t exactly understand how or why. To me, that´s what the story is very much about: the expectations people have in life, and the longing for life to live up to its fullest."
And unlike Virginia Wolf and Laura Brown, Streep´s Clarissa lives in a time that encourages greated freedom of expression and desire, especially for women. "My characters gets to be so much more emotional," she observes. "The other two women in the story are so contained, they´re suppressing so much, but I´m the one who really explodes in the end.