Meryl Streep unveils a billboard for "The Iron Lady."

Meryl Streep scores an Oscar nomination practically every time she steps on screen. But her new film, about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is winning more critics than fans, and it has yet to hit theaters.

Norman Tebbit, who served as Thatcher’s employment secretary, slammed the movie in the U.K.’s Telegraph, writing that “she was never, in my experience, the half-hysterical, over-emotional, over-acting woman portrayed by Meryl Streep.”

“I can’t see the point of this film,” Lord Bell, one of Thatcher’s public relations advisers,  told the Telegraph in another article. “Its only value is to make some money for Meryl Streep and whoever wrote it. I have no interest in seeing it. I don’t need a film to remind me of my experiences of her. It is a non-event. It won’t make any difference to her place in history of the fact of what she did.”

Streep was modest when the Daily Mail asked her about the movie earlier this month, saying she’s in “awe” of Thatcher and playing her was the biggest role of her career. “It took a lot out of me, but it was a privilege to play her, it really was,” she said.

“The Iron Lady” comes out Dec. 30. Representatives for Streep and the film’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, did not immediately respond to ABCNews.com’s requests for comment.