WHEN NANCY MEYERS was considering who to cast for the two female leads in her latest film, The Holiday, she was inundated with calls from agents and managers pitching their clients.
'I know how many women wanted this part, and that's always a good indication to me of what they're being offered and what's out there,' says Meyers.
The writer-director, 57, is known in the industry for her authentic renderings of strong female leads. Before The Holiday, she gave Diane Keaton a new lease of life - and helped her win an Oscar, for her part in Something's Gotta Give, which also starred Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves. In What Women Want, which she directed based on a screenplay by Cathy Yuspa and Josh Goldsmith, she gave Helen Hunt's ad-executive character depth and vulnerability. Before that, she wrote the Disney family comedy The Parent Trap and Father of the Bride and its sequel.
Meyers looks like the Hollywood powerhouse she is, striking a balance between sophistication (an A-line charmeuse skirt, grey cashmere, slim gold bangles) and West Coast trendiness (wedge-heeled boots, a great hairdo). In conversation, she's as smart, funny and honest as the women she writes about.
In The Holiday, the two main female roles went to Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz. They play alter-egos, to some extent. Amanda (Diaz) is a high-flying, neurotic, successful movie trailer editor who lives in a big mansion in Brentwood and has just found out that her boyfriend (a brief role by Ed Burns) has cheated on her.
With the holidays approaching, she finds a home-exchange website where she comes across a bucolic English cottage owned by Iris (Winslet), a writer of wedding announcements at a big British broadsheet who has just discovered that the man she's been in love with for years is getting married to someone else. The two swap homes for the holidays, men are met, affairs are begun ... and a romantic comedy is born.
