Meryl Streep is about to turn sixty but has never been hotter in Hollywood - and she’s more surprised than anyone!

“Twenty years ago, I would have been dead and buried and in the retired actor’s home at his age,” the beaming icon tells Grazia, looking anything but retiring in an aubergine Donna Karan silk tunic over black pants and Banana Republic sandals showing off deep green toenails. “I do wish I could feel it more than I do,” she muses, “but I don’t feel the glow of all the accolades that come my way; I just have my own worries and my own doubts and insecurities and that’s what I fix on.”

At an age where only British dames survive on the big screen, Meryl has worked on six films back-to-back in the past eighteen months including: Mamma Mia, the highest-grossing musical of all time; Doubt, in which she dons a nun’s habit and earned a Golden Globe nomination, and the upcoming comedy Julie Julia, in which she will play cooking guru Julia Childs.

“I’ve never done that in my life,” she marvels, “but for some reason these great roles all came along at once so I had to do them!”

Doubt, based on the Broadway play of the same name, is set in 1964 and centers on a nun (Streep) who confronts a priest (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) after suspecting he is molesting a black student at the Catholic school she runs. It’s Meryl at her plainest; no makeup, big glasses and a nun’s habit that made Sally Field’s flying nun look fashionable! But it’s a powerhouse performance with no hint of ego and has wowed critics and audiences alike.

“I found it really liberating to not have to think what to put on every day and I also felt part of a community with the other nuns,” Meryl confessed of her new austere look. “All I had to work with were my hands and face, which puts restrictions on the palette of how you’re making your painting. My husband told me in art school people sometimes did their best work when the teacher gave them two minutes to make a sketch, because it reduced their ability to embellish, so it was a valuable thing.”

It’s impossible not to warm to the genuinely normal woman sitting in the hotel suite promoting her new film, even though we should want to hate her. After all this is a woman whose credits include; The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs Kramer, Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood, Out of Africa, The Hours and The Devil Wears Prada. She’s been nominated for 14 Academy Awards and 23 Golden Globes and has won two Oscars and six Globes, prompting Nicole Kidman to nickname her ‘the Great One’ when they worked together on The Hours. As if all that wasn’t enough, Meryl managed to achieve all this while staying happily married to her husband of 30 years, sculptor Donald Gummer, and raising four children; Louisa, 17, Grace, 22, Marnie, 25 and Henry, 30.

“I think it was tough when they were younger,” she says of being the offspring of a living legend, “but it’s even harder for my nieces and nephews who have Streep as a last name (Meryl’s children are all Gummers). I remember my nephew Abraham, when he was playing baseball at twelve or thirteen, the coach would call the team in and say, ‘come on in, Meryl!’ So people are cruel, but I think they got through it OK.”

Meryl seems to be getting through it OK too, confiding that she still dislikes walking the red carpet but also admitting that her New Year’s resolution is to ‘engage more in life.’

“I’m a Cancer, a crab,” she explains, “so I like to be home and I don’t like to go out and party but I’m trying to be more engaging and deal with the world outside because life is short so you’ve got to meet everybody you can!”