Meryl Streep

Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress. Recognized as one of the most versatile performers of her era, Streep is noted for her technical precision, command of dialects, and professional longevity. She is an alumna of Vassar College and the Yale School of Drama, holding a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts. Her artistic process often includes refining her characters' dialogue so that their motivations possess a psychological depth and agency that transcend traditional archetypes. Beyond her creative work, she is a prominent advocate for gender parity, labor protections, and a challenge to the influence of the male gaze in film criticism and production.

Streep began her professional stage career in 1975 in Trelawny of the Wells and earned a Tony Award nomination the following year for 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. She transitioned to film in Julia (1977), followed by her first Academy Award nomination for The Deer Hunter (1978). For Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), she won her first Oscar after advocating to rewrite her character's courtroom testimony, shifting the role from a secondary antagonist to a portrayal focused on a woman's autonomy. She became a leading actress of the 1980s with performances in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Sophie's Choice (1982), and Out of Africa (1985), for which she received the Best Actress award at Cannes.

After expanding into various genres in the 1990s, Streep achieved a new level of commercial stardom in the 2000s. She transitioned from her established dramatic niche to lead high-grossing mainstream successes, portraying a formidable antagonist in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and a singing lead in the musical Mamma Mia! (2008). During this period, she continued to receive critical acclaim for her dramatic turns in Doubt (2008) and The Iron Lady (2011), the latter earning her a third Academy Award.

Her career honors include three Academy Awards, eight Golden Globe Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. She is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honor, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, and an Honorary César. In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She holds the record for the most Academy Award and Globe nominations of any performer, with 21 and 34 respectively. A prolific artist, her career spans over 64 films and 18 television projects, alongside more than 20 musical recordings and 30 audiobooks.

Early life and education

Mary Louise Streep was born on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey, to artist Mary Wilkinson Streep and pharmaceutical executive Harry William Streep Jr. She has two younger brothers, Harry William Streep III and Dana David Streep, both actors. Streep's mother, who she claims looks like Dame Judi Dench, strongly encouraged her daughter and instilled confidence in her from a very young age. Streep said, "She was a mentor because she said to me, 'Meryl, you're capable. You're so great.' She was saying, 'You can do whatever you put your mind to. If you're lazy, you're not going to get it done. But if you put your mind to it, you can do anything.' And I believed her." Although she was naturally more introverted than her mother, when she later needed an injection of confidence in adulthood, she would consult her mother at times for advice.

Streep was raised as a Presbyterian in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and attended Cedar Hill Elementary School and the Oak Street School, which was a junior high school at that time. In her junior high debut, she starred as Louise Heller in the play The Family Upstairs. In 1963, the family moved to Bernardsville, New Jersey, where she attended Bernards High School. As a "gawky kid with glasses and frizzy hair", she liked to show off in front of the camera in family home movies from a young age. At age 12, Streep was selected to sing at a school recital, leading to her having opera lessons from Estelle Liebling. Despite her talent, she later remarked, "I was singing something I didn't feel and understand. That was an important lesson—not to do that. To find the thing that I could feel through." She quit after four years. Streep had many Catholic school friends, and regularly attended Mass. She was a high school cheerleader for the Bernards High School Mountaineers. She was also chosen as the homecoming queen her senior year.

Although Streep appeared in numerous school plays during her high school years, she was uninterested in serious theater until acting in the play Miss Julie at Vassar College in 1969, in which she gained attention across the campus. Vassar drama professor Clinton J. Atkinson noted, "I don't think anyone ever taught Meryl acting. She really taught herself." Streep demonstrated an early ability to mimic accents and to quickly memorize her lines. She earned her AB in drama cum laude in 1971, before applying for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the Yale School of Drama. At Yale, she supplemented her course fees by working as a waitress and typist, and appeared in over a dozen stage productions per year; at one point, she became overworked and developed ulcers, so she contemplated quitting acting and switching to study law. Streep played a variety of roles on stage, from Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. She was a student of choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, whom she introduced at the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors. Another of her teachers was Robert Lewis, a co-founder of the Actors Studio. Streep disapproved of some of the acting exercises she was asked to do, remarking that one professor taught the emotional recall technique by delving into personal lives in a way she found "obnoxious". She earned her MFA in drama from Yale in 1975. She also enrolled as a visiting student at Dartmouth College in 1970, and received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the college in 1981.

Career

1970s: Early work and breakthrough

One of Streep's first professional jobs in 1975 was at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, during which she acted in five plays over six weeks. She moved to New York City in 1975, and was cast by Joseph Papp in a production of Trelawny of the Wells at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, opposite Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow. She went on to appear in five more roles in her first year in New York, including in Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival productions of Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew with Raul Julia, and Measure for Measure opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale. She entered into a relationship with Cazale at this time, and resided with him until his death three years later. She starred in the musical Happy End on Broadway, and won an Obie for her performance in the off-Broadway play Alice at the Palace.

Although Streep had not aspired to become a film actor, Robert De Niro's performance in Taxi Driver (1976) had a profound impact on her; she said to herself, 'That's the kind of actor I want to be when I grow up.' Streep began auditioning for film roles, and underwent an unsuccessful audition for the lead role in Dino De Laurentiis's remake of the action adventure King Kong which was released in 1976. De Laurentiis, referring to Streep as she stood before him, said in Italian to his son: "This is so ugly. Why did you bring me this?" Unknown to Laurentiis, Streep understood Italian, and she remarked, "I'm very sorry that I'm not as beautiful as I should be, but, you know – this is it. This is what you get." She continued to work on Broadway, appearing in the 1976 double bill of Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays. She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. Streep's other Broadway credits include Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical Happy End, in which she had originally appeared off-Broadway at the Chelsea Theater Center. She received Drama Desk Award nominations for both productions.

Streep's first feature film role came opposite Jane Fonda in the 1977 film Julia, in which she had a small role during a flashback sequence. Most of her scenes were edited out, but the brief time on screen horrified the actress, "I had a bad wig and they took the words from the scene I shot with Jane and put them in my mouth in a different scene. I thought, I've made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business." However, Streep stated in 2015 that Fonda had a lasting influence on her as an actress, and credited her with opening "probably more doors than I probably even know about". Robert De Niro, who had spotted Streep in her stage production of The Cherry Orchard, suggested that she play the role of his girlfriend in the war film The Deer Hunter (1978). Cazale, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, was also cast in the film, and Streep took on the role of a "vague, stock girlfriend" to remain with Cazale for the duration of filming. Pauline Kael, who later became a strong critic of Streep, remarked that she was a "real beauty" who brought much freshness to the film with her performance. The film's success exposed Streep to a wider audience and earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.