Speaking at the London Film Festival last week, Streep said "the Church is a body that excludes people".

"There are two places you [women] can't vote in the world - in Saudi Arabia, although they are registering people supposedly, and the Vatican," she said.

"That seems wrong to me."

Streep plays suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst in the new film "Suffragette".

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Still current is the fallout of actions of 2DAY FM employees who appeared to have prompted the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha, who was vulnerable to suicide. Also recent is the criticism that, while the media were empowering church sexual abuse victims by telling their stories, the victims and their stories were providing fodder for one of the year's biggest media events, so that media outlets were in effect capitalising on lives broken by the church. Earlier the BBC was exposed for suppressing coverage of the exploitative behaviour of one of its own, Jimmy Savile.

Back in January, we were reflecting on the film The Iron Lady, and Meryl Streep's determination not to make a plaything of Margaret Thatcher. Instead she would continue her own lifelong effort as an actor to 'defend the humanity of people that we've made into emblematic figures of one sort or another'. Continue reading

Sources

• Michael Mullins in Eureka Street
• Image: The Guardian

Michael Mullins is editor of Eureka Street