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Meryl Streep in this film is who Meryl Streep in most of her other films has always been, through her seamless performance convincingly putting on the screen a strong-willed woman determinedly leading her own life. Different from the beautiful and charming Karen Dinesen in Out Of Africa though, Florence in this film is a lady with a winkled face and a bloated body, yet the independent spirits in the two women are nonetheless the same, and Florence's old face in this film might have inspired the audience to entertain the idea that a high spirit may not necessarily wind down as one's physical body ages.
Hugh Grant's performance is excellent as welll. But unlike Streep, he breaks away from the parts he played in his previous movies, among them, Charles in Four Weddings and One Funeral and Michael Felgate in Mickey Blue Eyes. Consequently, it might have to take a good part of the film for the audience to give the character he performs the benefit of reasonable double that, regardless of his flawed personal life beyond Florence's knowledge, St. Clare Bayfiled has been neither a cynical man nor an entire gold-digger as some people suggest, but a loving and protecting husband all along who devotes himself to his wife and her love of music. His misleading of his wife regarding her singing talents might have been an issue morally debatable, as well as has in part led to Florence's catastrophic event in Carnage Hall, yet his tearing-up presence at her dying bed to give her the last support and comfort she in despair needs is by all means genuine and more than moving. It is the confession of a committed soul: "I was never laughing at you. Yours was the truest voice I've ever heard."