'Julia' was homage to my mother: Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep saw her role as US cooking idol Julia Child in "Julie & Julia" as a tribute to her mother, a woman "with the same joie de vivre," the veteran actress said Thursday.

"What I was trying to do with Julia was do homage to my mother," she told a news conference at the Rome film festival, where the film by Nora Ephron was to be screened out of competition on Friday.

"My mother was a woman of this era, she had the same joie de vivre," said two-time Oscar winner Streep, 60, who was to receive a career award on Friday to cap a weeklong retrospective of her work here.

"She was someone like they describe Julia Child as being, who walked into a room and just lit it up," Streep said of her mother. "She made friends easily and was gregarious, and she communicated her enthusiasms with great joy."

"Julie & Julia," which premiered in New York on July 30 and has since been widely released, blends a biopic of Child with the story of Julie Powell, a blogger who set herself the challenge of cooking all 527 recipes in Child's first cookbook in a single year.

"Embedded in this film is the idea is that as long as you have food and shelter, the necessities... what makes you happy on top of that is very simple and it's accessible to anyone," Streep said. "It's a lovely message and it's certainly true."

To prepare for the role, Streep said she watched all of Child's cooking shows broadcast in the United States on an off over 20 years.

"Most valuable were the very, very first shows" for an idea of Child's true character, Streep said.

"She was nervous. She still had that swooping voice, but she was less mannered and more real."

Also screening out of competition at the festival's fourth edition was the Coen brothers' dark comedy "A Serious Man" about a nebbish, weak-willed Midwestern professor, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who lets life crush him like a steamroller. "Do I really have to pay for his funeral?" he asks his lawyer after his wife's lover dies in a car crash.

"A Serious Man" is set in Minnesota, where Ethan and Joel Coen grew up, but Ethan insisted the story was not autobiographical.

Some characters "were hybrids between people you know, others were characters you make from whole cloth," said Joel.

Asked about reactions to the film, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last month and has since had limited release in the United States, Denmark and Canada, Ethan said: "Whenever you get a specific ethnicity, some people are ready to take offence."

Joel added: "We were afraid some sensitivities would be rubbed the wrong way and were pleasantly surprised, but (the positive response) was not monolithic. There's always going to be a bit of pushback."

Stuhlbarg said he found the film "to be very true to the Jewish experience."

The festival, which began October 15 and was to wrap up with Friday's award ceremony, screened 14 films vying for best film, best actor and actress and a jury award as well as an award for best film voted by the public.

Offering star power to this year's festival was Hollywood hunk George Clooney in Canadian director Jason Reitman's comedy "Up in the Air" and Richard Gere in the out-of-competition "Hachiko" about the deep bond between a professor and the Japanese Akita dog.

The festival kicked off with Oscar-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic's gut-wrenching film "Triage" recounting the harrowing experience of two British photojournalists covering the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict in 1988.