STREEP SOUNDS

MERYL STREEP'S VOICE-OVER WORK IN ANIMATED AND DOCUMENTARY FILMS HAS BEEN JUST AS DISTINGUISHED AS HER OTHER PERFORMANCES

MICHAEL THOMSEN

A young boy opens his eyes, uncertain of where he is. A voice calls out to him through the blue glow of a submerged New York, unmistakable but still hard to place. It's familiar but distant, like a voicemail from home: "You have been searching for me, haven't you, David?"

The scene, from the end of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg's 2001 tribute to Stanley Kubrick, marked Streep's debut as a voice actor. Streep has made a distinguished second career for herself behind the mic. The transition was natural, since an emphasis on speech is central to all her performances. "That's my way in," she told National Public Radio in 2012, "the very beginning, how to enter it. Very quickly in the process, I don't think of voice as being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick."

In 2009, Streep went from cameos to featured performer in Wes Anderson's stopmotion adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, playing "Mrs. George Clooney," the wife of a mischievous fox who organizes a band of animal insurgents to fight the farmers trying to wipe them out. "It was sort of like recording a musical piece almost," Streep said at the New York premiere in 2009, "because Wes is so specific about the nuance and sound of it. He feels the sound calls up a whole set of expressions, and since the animatronics are so limited in what they can express, it all had to be in our voices. "

Streep has also used her vocal talents to open a window on the real world, or at least the one that emerges through documentary film. She helped launch the American version of Michael Apted's Up series by narrating Age 7 in America, a documentary following the lives of several children of various ethnicities and economic backgrounds. Nature documentaries may have made the most effective use of Streep's calming, wonder-filled voice. In To the Arctic 3D, she captured the dignity of a polar bear caring for her two cubs. The underwater IMAX documentary The Living Sea set her narration to a lush Sting score.

These projects aren't diversions, but an important part of her development as an actor. "My own bias," Streep told the Hartford Courantm 2014, "is to educate yourself about everything but acting."