Disco diva Mery finds her feet; Actress Meryl Streep is hoping film audiences will Take a Chance on her singing, with Mamma Mia! The Movie now in cinemas

Evening Chronicle (Newcastle, England), July 11, 2008

MERYL Streep is best-known for her serious roles in films like Out Of Africa, so it's really quite hard to imagine her as a flamboyant Lycra-clad blonde belting out Super Trouper and other Abba numbers.

But this is exactly the surprising transformation the two-time Oscar-winner has undergone for one of this summer's brightest blockbusters - the film adaptation of the hit musical Mamma Mia!

When we meet at a London hotel, Meryl is looking her usual demure self - but she's mischievous, and keen to dispel the idea that she's out of place in musicals.

"I've done a lot of musicals in my life.

"My first Broadway show was a musical and then I'd done a lot of musicals in high school, so it was like coming home to a thing that I always loved doing," she says.

Meryl heads an impressive cast-list as Donna, a hippy mum running a guest house on a Greek island, whose only daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is about to get married to Sky (Dominic Cooper).

Unknown to Donna, Sophie has pinched her mum's diary from the year she was born and has invited her three potential fathers (played by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) to her wedding, although her mum hasn't seen them in 20 years.

Cue much mayhem in the sweltering heat as Sophie tries to work out which man is her dad and Donna tries to chase them off the island - all set to various Abba classics.

One of the funniest, and most surreal moments comes during Sophie's hen party, when Donna and her best friends (played by Julie Walters and Christine Baranski) squeeze back into their platform boots and colourful flares to perform one more time as 1970s band Donna And The Dynamos.

Meryl, who recently turned 59 but doesn't look anywhere near it, actually fell in love with Mamma Mia! after watching it on Broadway in 2001.

"I took my 10-year-old and her birthday party right after it had opened. It was right after September 11 and everyone was feeling really low and I thought, 'What am I going to do with all these children?'," she explains. "I saw an ad in the New York Times and it said 'new British musical' and something about 'fun' and I thought, 'Boy, I'm there'.

"I took the children and we were all just dancing in the aisles. I bought the cast album and sang the songs for two years."

The actress, who has four children with her husband of almost 30 years Don Gummer, admits she was apprehensive about her now grown-up offspring seeing their mum in psychedelic 1970s gear for some of the big retro-dance numbers. "I was nervous, but then I showed them all the stills and they've already had their mortification moment about me wearing spandex.

"We have to get over this," she says with a laugh.

The cast certainly had to work hard to get all the songs - and dance moves - perfect. "It was so hard to get those steps right. We worked on it three weeks before we began shooting.

"They played those disco lights eight hours a day and the migraine set in, but we couldn't wait to get there in the morning and do it again because it was so fun!"

As well as the big numbers Donna sings with the cast, Meryl also sings a duet - SOS - with Brosnan and then sings The Winner Takes It All to him just before Sophie's wedding.

She says: "I've sung all of these songs about 70,000 times from starting in my closet, which was the only place my family would allow me to practise.

"But I never got sick of singing the songs. There's so many great songs, but it wasn't hard work, it was a joy."

CAPTION(S):

GROOM - Dominic Cooper as Sky; SUPER TROUPERS - Christine Baranski, Meryl Streep and Julie Walters. Right, Pierce Brosnan as one of the potential dads; I DO, I DO, I DO, I DO, I DO - Amanda Seyfr ied plays Donna's daughter Sophie