Meryl Streep’s cheerleading ambition

Meryl Streep wanted to be a cheerleader.

The ‘Mamma Mia’ star has revealed she turned away from opera as a young girl to pursue her love of cheerleading.

She said: "I’d travel from New Jersey to New York to study with her. She was a great teacher and I was an idiot. I was a teenager. I thought opera was boring, and I wanted to be a cheerleader, so I quit and started smoking."

However, singing has always been a big part of the 67-year-old actress’ life and she loved embarrassing her kids by singing to them when they were young.

Speaking on Reel Pieces with Annette Insdorf, she added: "If you have children, when they’re babies, they let you sing to them. But after that, no. My kids were always telling me to shut up, so I didn’t sing at home."

Meanwhile, Meryl previously admitted she found it "surprisingly easy" to sing badly in ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’.

She said: "To sing badly was surprisingly easy … sadly. It was great fun, she was very specific in how she sang.

"She was a woman who just loved music and she gave lots of money away to the symphony and all sorts of music enterprises in the city."

And Meryl used to worry that every film she did would be her last.

She shared: "If you’re lucky you can keep working. But everybody has troughs and dismal times – every single person. I remember as I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really. And all the evidence of other 40-year-old women at that time – this is 27 years ago – would lead you to believe it was over.

"On a certain level you don’t have any choice – you’re unhappy if you’re not doing it, so you’re compelled in a certain way."