Devil in Disguise

SPOTLIGHT

best-kept secret in Hollywood, a pink-and-cream glamour goddess who's also a supple comedienne. But perhaps you know her in her other, more familiar guise: the grand tragedienne whose mantels groan with Oscars, the latter-day Bernhardt who can suffer mightily in twenty-nine different accents, plus Esperanto. That's right, the poodle in the picture is none other than Meryl Streep. Of course, Streep the deep-dish thespian has not exactly kept herself under wraps. But Streep the funny girl is all too rare. You may dimly recall her peeking through the holes in Heartburn (1986), but it was as the delicious femme fatale in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) that she really proved her comic mettle. What she's trying to prove in Susan Seidelman's new movie, She-Devil, is harder to say: she plays a pampered romance novelist—the one in this photo—who seduces Ed Begley Jr. away from his long-suffering wife, played by TV's ratings monster, Roseanne Barr. Seidelman has not had the world's best track record (her last two movies were Cookie and Making Mr. Right), but the way she's cast her new picture is at least amusing: advance word has it that Barr's role is as solemn as Streep's is a stitch.

STEPHEN SCHIFF