What has LuPone ever played that shows the kind of restraint and quiet steeliness that makes Meryl Streep's performance so iconic? She's a master of her craft, but Miranda Priestly she ain't. Williams has already played a version of the role in *Ugly Betty* and was quite spectacular in it. I can't help but picture the marvelous Donna Murphy, whose performance in *Follies* still ranks as one of the most stellar takes on the ice queen. Someone mentioned warmth as an element that Miranda should have, and I disagree. There's nothing warm about Miranda. Streep and David Frankel worked to make her less two-dimensional than she's in the novel, but at no point did they turn the character into a warm person. She is vulnerable at times, never warm or loving or anything of the sort. If not Murphy, Toni Collette would be genius in the role as well.
"Some people can thrive and bloom living life in a living room, that's perfect for some people of one hundred and five. But I at least gotta try, when I think of all the sights that I gotta see, all the places I gotta play, all the things that I gotta be at"