Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir has been played on stage and screen by everyone from Anne Bancroft to Ingrid Bergman to Tovah Feldshuh to Lynn Cohen. But in “Golda,” Guy Nattiv’s intimate look at Meir’s final years in office, the task is taken up by none other than Dame Helen Mirren.
As it happens, the Oscar-winning master of the real-life figure (Queen Elizabeth II in “The Queen,” Alma Reville in “Hitchcock”) happened to be very close in age to Meir in the years surrounding the Yom Kippur War. However, they aged quite differently.
The makeup and hairstyling team of “Golda” — one of the few all-female crews to receive an Oscar nomination in this category — put Mirren through the paces in one of her few fully transformative prosthetic makeovers, in massive close-up shots that spare no wrinkle nor fold.