Meryl Streep has reacted to the backlash she received for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady.

Meryl Streep has admitted to developing a tremendous affection for Margaret Thatcher after playing her in a film, although she is firmly a member of Hollywood’s liberal elite, who defines herself as part of “the Left”

She claimed that playing Thatcher had taught her to value what she had accomplished despite the odds. “The more I learned, the more my view of her changed. Wherever you stand on her policies, and many people didn’t like her, the scale of her influence and the fact that she got things done was extraordinary,” she said. “And the mental, physical, spiritual energy that it took to live every one of those days as head of the government was phenomenal. It’s really humbling to consider that she was at 10 Downing Street for ten-and-a-half years. I admire that achievement. I stand in awe of it, even though I didn’t agree with a lot of her policies.”

Former Conservative Party chairman Lord Tebbit, as well as other former colleagues of Baroness Thatcher, have criticized the film.

He called the performance “half-hysterical, over-emotional”.

“I felt that if we did it in the right way, it would be OK,” Streep told the BBC, ahead of its release on 6 January.

“There is a feeling that the walls are just more permeable between the present and the past and one intrudes on the other.”

“It’s something that I don’t think there should be a stigma about, it’s life, it’s the truth.

“We’ve all had that moment where you can’t remember why you went upstairs and so it was extrapolating that feeling of disorientation, momentary as it is,” Streep added.

The 62-year-old went on: “I wanted to capture whatever it was that drew people to her or meant people have a special venom for her.”

Streep, who is up for her third Academy Award for her performance in The Iron Lady, stated that playing the part taught her to admire a woman who thrived in a male-dominated society.

“I was aware of her very early on and, even though her policies were not popular, to say the least, in my circles, people were kind of thrilled that a woman had become leader,” she told the Radio Times.

“When I was in college the professions open to women were so few – there were very few women that went to law school, no one dreamed of being a corporate head, it was out of the question.

“You could, perhaps, become leader of a company, maybe if they made make-up. You could be editor of a magazine but only if it was a woman’s magazine … that’s the world that Margaret Thatcher entered and then rose right to the very top and it’s extraordinary.”

The film follows an elderly Baroness Thatcher, who is suffering from acute dementia and is in constant contact with her late husband Denis Thatcher, played by Jim Broadbent, in a sequence of flashbacks.

If Thatcher, now 86, sees the film, directed by Phyllida Lloyd of Mamma Mia!, Streep hopes she will realize it was made with “respect”

“I doubt very much that she will ever see the film but if she does I hope that she would see in it an empathetic attempt to understand the size of what her life was, her place in history, what she did and also the cost, the human cost that we ask our leaders to pay,” she said. “I don’t think we have given her a pass on anything but I hope that she would see that the film is made with respect.”

Streep said that nailing her voice and mannerisms was crucial to her success in the part. “There were also things like how she held herself, how she stood and how she sat, how she crossed her legs and what jewellery she wore, how she set her head when she was making a point – all of those things were important. And they were specific to her, so I did try to capture that to a certain degree because it had a lot to do with how people reacted to her. It was her armour.”