At the premiere of “The Iron Lady” iTuesday night, actress Meryl Streep — who plays the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — answered the compliment of her portrayal as “humanizing” by commenting on society‘s habit of casting politicians in black-and-white terms. “We do this to our leaders. We cast them as monsters … You know, Nixon’s a monster, Reagan is a whatever we thought of him, Bush is this … People are very much more complicated than monsters or saints,” she said. For her part, Streep, 62, has said she admires Lady Thatcher, though she still disagrees with her politics. “I still don’t agree with a lot of her policies,” she said, “But I feel she believed in them and that they came from an honest conviction, and that she wasn’t a cosmetic politician just changing make-up to suit the times. She stuck to what she believed in, and that’s a hard thing to do.”
