Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

When HarperCollins sent me a review copy of Michael Schulman’s “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep” my initial reaction was “Is there really anything new to learn about Meryl Streep?” Even the cover photograph of a young, pensive Streep, chin resting on her hand, annoyed me. It’s now been 40 years since she made her first screen appearance opposite Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave in Fred Zinnemann’s “Julia” and 45 years since she made her Broadway theater debut in “Trelawny of the Wells,” produced by Joe Papp (resilient survivor of a destitute Brooklyn childhood and legendary New York theater impresario.) Is there really anything we don’t already know about the “world’s greatest actress”?

It turns out the answer is yes. For example, who knew that Streep’s mother was born in Brooklyn and later studied at the Art Student League? Or that Streep’s father, the son of a traveling salesman, would one day sob while watching his grandson in a high school production of “Death of a Salesman”? The book’s author, Michael Schulman, has pulled off a Sherlock Holmes-worthy act of dogged and determined sleuthing and has written a compulsively readable biography. Schulman, who is a contributor and arts editor at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Times and Vanity Fair, has unearthed people and episodes from Streep’s past that clarify and illuminate why she is who she is. The biography avoids both hagiography and slander. Schulman is neither Mr. Bernstein from “Citizen Kane” nor the reporter from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” (“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”) Instead, although he’s an admitted fan, he is fair and balanced, and unlike Fox News, has no agenda.

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Below are edited excerpts from our recent conversation.

Eagle: Did you approach the writing of the book as a critic, as a fan, as a historian?

Michael Schulman: All of the above. First I was a fan. I got into Meryl, weirdly, because I became really obsessed with her acceptance speeches at awards shows. I actually started memorizing them. You know, when she wins awards she has this great persona of self-deprecation combined with diva confidence and I started wondering, “Who is this person?” How did she attain this cherished show business status, because it seems like she’s been there forever on this pedestal called “The Greatest Living Actress.” So, I started out as someone who admires her but thinks of her as a mystery, and so, in that sense, I was a fan. I wouldn’t have written a book unless I was truly interested in what was going on inside of her head and her life story. But also, as a reporter, I wanted to put the pieces of this puzzle together, principally her life in the ’70s. I loved the idea of going back and talking with her high school and college classmates, forming a picture of what those years were like, plus the “new Hollywood,” Joe Papp’s Public Theater, all these different milieus really interested me. So, you could also say that I went into it as a nostalgist for ’70s New York. But then, also as a critic, I wanted to figure out what was it about Meryl Streep that gave her this level of acclaim and why her rather than any other number of actresses who were contemporaneous with her?

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Eagle: What surprised you while doing your research and writing the book?

MS: A couple of things. One was that feminism became such a big theme in the book. I knew that she is now a very vocal feminist — we saw her stumping for Hillary at the Democratic National Convention, advocating for the Women’s History Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. But the more I learned about her life in the ’70s the more I saw how she was born into the second wave of feminism, the era of Ms. Magazine and Gloria Steinem and all that. And her conception of gender I think was one fascinating thing I was able to track from her high school years, where she was a cheerleader and the homecoming queen and was dating the star football player, through her college years at Vassar and Yale Drama, when her mind really opened up, to “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Taming of the Shrew” at the Public. These were projects where she was questioning what kinds of roles women should play, in life and in show business, and I think that accounts for a large part for her longevity as an actress. She was never interested in just being an ingenue or a pretty face.

Another thing that surprised me, I have to say, was the nature of her relationship with Dustin Hoffman during the making of “Kramer vs. Kramer.” I was stunned, frankly, to find out some of the stuff he pulled on her. I mean, I knew that they had tension on the set, but slapping her in the face to get a desired reaction? Digging deeply into it and discovering some of the crazy notions he had about method acting and how it played out was very surprising.

Eagle: What I found particularly refreshing about your biography is that you don’t get into scandals or possible skeletons in the closet, you scrupulously avoid any snark. Was this a deliberate decision from the beginning?

MS: I didn’t go into the book with any pre-determined, foregone conclusions. I was very open to whatever I would find out. I mean, we know she’s a great actress, but why? One of the other things that surprised me was that she didn’t really have a method (or “the Method”) per se. She can’t articulate what her method or her technique is. Everyone always says, “Oh, she has so much technique.” But according to her it’s instinct, it’s a grab-bag of this school of acting and that. Regarding her character, I didn’t find anyone who had horrible things to say about her … sometimes that made it a little more difficult to create drama in the book because [laughing] of course, it’s easier when someone turns out to be a huge monster. But what I did find was that she was in the middle of a lot of dramatic ecosystems, whether it was the Yale School of Drama under Robert Brustein [the notoriously autocratic Dean of Yale Drama at the time of Streep’s matriculation], or dealing with Dustin on “Kramer vs. Kramer.” You know, I hope she comes across as a hero in her own story, but she also faced a lot of obstacles and I think that’s what gives the book an arc.

Eagle: Did you know from the start where the cut-off point of the book would be?

MS: I knew that it was her origin story and the arc was basically going to be her 20’s and the period was going to be the 1970s, because I wanted to tell the story of her rise. How she became the star that she is. Originally, I was going to go through to “Sophie’s Choice.” But as I was writing the book I realized that her [Best Supporting Actress] Oscar for “Kramer vs. Kramer” was a more natural stopping point, because it was her first huge success in movies. She got married, she had a kid and she had the next couple of years of her career all planned out. So, in a sense I thought [her Oscar was] the perfect beat to end on. She’s turned 30, she’s sort of fully formed as a person and as an adult — and as a movie star. She was on her way.

Eagle: Much of what you’ve uncovered about her life and career is revelatory — and not just about Streep. For example, how did you find out about the guy at the pre-release screening of “Kramer vs. Kramer” who gets up to go to the lobby to call his babysitter?

MS: Robert Benton [the director of “Kramer vs. Kramer”] told me that. He saw it happen. It happened at a test screening in Kansas City, where he was lurking in the back and he saw a guy leave the theater at a really climactic moment in the film. Benton was upset because he figured the guy was bored. So, he followed the guy out and saw him calling home to check on his kid. That’s when Benton realized that he was home free, because obviously the film was touching a collective nerve.

Eagle: You write, “[Streep] was a dead ringer for Alessio Baldovinetti’s ‘Portrait of a Lady in Yellow.’” That’s a fairly obscure painter to reference. How did you happen to find that particular portrait?

MS: That was a reference that was in an article about her. I went back and dug up everything that was written about her at the time, especially in that first burst of fame in 1979-1980. Everyone was making these sort of breathless comparisons about her beauty. It was said she was like a Brancusi or that Baldovinetti portrait (which I think was mentioned in a Vogue profile.) I thought it was an important thing to talk about, how once she became a movie star how she was perceived and portrayed in the press. And also, how she behaved around journalists because she didn’t like to be interviewed, she didn’t like the whole fame aspect of acting.

Eagle: That’s a good segue to my next question: I recently watched “Charade” again and because I was reading your book at the time, I thought, “I cannot imagine Meryl Streep playing Audrey Hepburn’s role, a woman essentially depending on a man to rescue her.” (In this case, not just any man, but Cary Grant.) Streep seems too independent and strong to play a “damsel in distress.” Do you agree?

MS: Well, part of what she was doing early in her career was defining herself against those traditional cinematic roles that women played. She didn’t care about being a “glamorous movie actress.” She was playing Katherine in “Taming of the Shrew” at the Delacorte [Shakespeare in the Park]. So she would, as I write, brush off Dino DeLaurentiis when he sought to cast her in “King Kong.” She had no interest in being a sex object or a wilting love interest. Certainly, that independence was an obstacle in getting certain roles, but it also helped define who she was. Especially in relation to some of the other actresses coming up at the time like Jessica Lange. [Note: Who did end up taking the “King Kong” role.] Lange had this kind of cat-like sexiness, which was her thing. Meryl knew who she was by that point. She had a feminist backbone. But what you said reminded me that Pauline Kael [The New Yorker’s film critic at the time of Streep’s rise] could not stand anything that Meryl did and was her loudest critic. If you go back and read some of her reviews, they are full-on take-downs of Streep. Most famously, her review of “Sophie’s Choice” where she wrote something like, “Whenever I see Meryl Streep act I can’t picture her from the neck down.” Kael found her to be completely glacial, cerebral and phony. And hammered at this in every single review in a way that really got under Meryl’s skin.

Eagle: Harsh, typical Kael vitriol. However, “glacial” I might agree with. With Streep, I don’t see the captivating warmth of an Audrey Hepburn, or the gorgeous glamour of a Grace Kelly, the heady allure of an Ingrid Bergman…

MS: I think a better model might be Jane Fonda, who she worked with on her first movie. [The above-mentioned “Julia.”] Fonda really defined herself in ways that cut against these sort of old Hollywood archetypes. Meryl’s not interested in female archetypes at all, and she avoided them like the plague. But I think that’s what opened her up to these dramatic heroines that she played in the ’80s like Sophie Zawistowski in “Sophie’s Choice” and Karen Blixen in “Out of Africa” — movies that really brought her great acclaim. She got those roles because she was defining herself as a strong woman who didn’t need to be supported by a male character in the story.

Eagle: Another thing that has struck me is that Meryl has never worked with an auteur. For example, if you compare her with Isabelle Huppert, who has worked with Claude Chabrol, Michael Haneke, Marco Bellocchio, Andrzej Wajda, Meryl has never worked with a director of that stature.

MS: I completely agree and I think that’s one of the weaknesses in her career — that she sometimes works with directors she can overpower. And you get these Meryl Streep movies that are — I don’t want to say vanity projects — but movies where the whole thing revolves around her. What’s ironic is that in the early part of her career, which I focus on, she did work with a lot of really strong directors like Michael Cimino, who was a bit crazy, but who you could certainly refer to as an auteur. And Robert Benton also. And I think some of her best work since has been when she has worked with directors like Spike Jonze in “Adaptation.” Jonze took her out of her comfort zone. No, you’re definitely right, though, those are the exceptions. I would love to see her work with, for example, Paul Thomas Anderson or the Coen Brothers.

Eagle: Well she’s about to do her first film with Spielberg, playing Katherine Graham in “The Pentagon Papers.” Spielberg and Streep should be an interesting combination.

“Her Again” by Michael Schulman is now available in paperback from HarperCollins Publishers