Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress who has worked in
theatre,
television, and
film. She is widely regarded as one of the most talented and respected movie actors of the modern era.
Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's
The Playboy of Seville, and her screen debut came in the made-for-television movie
The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with
Julia. Both critical and commercial success came soon with roles in
The Deer Hunter (1978) and
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), the former giving Streep her first
Oscar nomination and the latter her first win. She later won an
Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in
Sophie's Choice (1982).
Streep has received 15 Academy Award nominations, winning two, and 23
Golden Globe nominations, winning six, more nominations than any other actor in the history of either award. Her work has also earned her two
Emmy Awards, two
Screen Actors Guild Awards, a
Cannes Film Festival award, three
New York Film Critics Circle Awards, five
Grammy Award nominations, a
BAFTA award, and a
Tony Award nomination.
Early life
Streep was born Mary Louise Streep in
Summit, New Jersey, the daughter of Mary W. Streep, a commercial artist, and Harry William Streep, Jr., a pharmaceutical executive.
Streep's mother was of
Swiss,
Irish, and
English ancestry, and her father's family was of
Dutch descent. Streep was raised
Presbyterian.
She has two younger brothers, Dana and Harry.
Streep was raised in
Bernardsville, New Jersey, where she attended and graduated from
Bernards High School.
She received her
B.A. in
Drama at
Vassar College in 1971 (where she briefly received instruction from
Jean Arthur), but also enrolled as an exchange student at
Dartmouth College for a semester before that school had become coeducational. She subsequently earned an
M.F.A. from
Yale School of Drama.
Early career
Streep performed in several theater productions in New York after graduating from
Yale School of Drama, including the
New York Shakespeare Festival productions of
Henry V,
The Taming of the Shrew with
Raúl Juliá, and
Measure for Measure opposite
Sam Waterston and
John Cazale, who became her fiancé. She starred on Broadway in the Brecht/Weill musical
Happy End, and won an
Obie for her performance in the all-sung off-Broadway production of
Alice at the Palace.
Streep began auditioning for film roles, and later recalled an unsuccessful audition for
Dino De Laurentiis for the leading role in
King Kong. De Laurentiis commented to his son in Italian, "She's ugly. Why did you bring me this thing?" and was shocked when Streep replied in fluent Italian.
Streep's first feature film was
Julia (1976), in which she played a small but pivotal role during a flashback scene. Streep was living in
New York City with her fiancé, the actor
John Cazale, who had been diagnosed with
bone cancer. He was cast in
The Deer Hunter (1978), and Streep was delighted to secure a small role because it allowed her to remain with Cazale for the duration of filming. She was not specifically interested in the part, commenting, "They needed a girl between the two guys and I was it."
[ citing ]
She played a leading role in the television
miniseries Holocaust (1978) as an
Aryan woman married to a
Jewish artist in
Nazi era Germany. She later explained that she had considered the material to be "unrelentingly noble",
and had taken the role only because she had needed money.
[ citing ] Streep travelled to Germany and Austria for filming while Cazale remained in New York. Upon her return, Streep found that Cazale's illness had progressed, and she nursed him until his death on March 12, 1978. She spoke of her grief and her hope that work would provide a diversion; she accepted a role in
The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) with
Alan Alda, later commenting that she played it on "automatic pilot",
and performed the role of
Kate in
The Taming of the Shrew for
Shakespeare in the Park.
[ citing ] With an estimated audience of 109 million,
Holocaust brought a degree of public recognition to Streep, who was described in August 1978 as "on the verge of national visibility".
She won the
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie for her performance.
The Deer Hunter (1978) was released a month later, and Streep was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. In September 1978, she married sculptor
Don Gummer.
Streep played a supporting role in
Manhattan (1979) for
Woody Allen, later stating that she had not seen a complete script and was given only the six pages of her own scenes,
[ citing ] and that she had not been permitted to improvise a word of her dialogue.
Asked to comment on the script for
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in a meeting with the producer Stan Jaffee, director
Robert Benton and star
Dustin Hoffman, Streep insisted that the female character was not representative of many real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles, and was written as "too evil".
Jaffee, Benton and Hoffman agreed with Streep, and the script was revised.
In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a mother and housewife with a career,
[Hollinger, p. 75] and frequented the
Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set.
Benton allowed Streep to write her dialogue in two of her key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman.
[Hollinger, p. 77] Jaffee and Hoffman later spoke of Streep's tirelessness, with Hoffman commenting, "She's extraordinarily hardworking, to the extent that she's obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else but what she's doing."
[ citing ]
Streep drew critical acclaim for her performance in each of her three films released in 1979: the
romantic comedy Manhattan, the political drama,
The Seduction of Joe Tynan and the
courtroom drama,
Kramer vs. Kramer. She was awarded the
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress,
National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress and
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress for her collective work in the three films. Among the awards won for
Kramer vs. Kramer were the Academy Award and
Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.
1980s
After prominent supporting roles in two of the 1970s most successful films, the consecutive winners of the
Academy Award for Best Picture,
The Deer Hunter and
Kramer vs. Kramer, and praise for her versatility in several supporting roles, Streep progressed to leading roles. Her first was
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981). A
story within a story drama, the film paired Streep with
Jeremy Irons as contemporary actors, telling their modern story as well as the
Victorian era drama they were performing. A
New York Magazine article commented that while many female stars of the past had cultivated a singular identity in their films, Streep was a "
chameleon", willing to play any type of role.
Streep was awarded her first
BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work.
Her next film, the
psychological thriller,
Still of the Night (1982) reunited her with
Robert Benton, the director of
Kramer vs. Kramer, and co-starred
Roy Scheider and
Jessica Tandy.
Vincent Canby, writing for the
New York Times noted that the film was an homage to the works of
Alfred Hitchcock, but that one of its main weaknesses was a lack of chemistry between Streep and Scheider, concluding that Streep "is stunning, but she's not on screen anywhere near long enough".
As the
Polish holocaust survivor in
Sophie's Choice (1982), Streep's emotional dramatic performance and her apparent mastery of a Polish accent drew praise.
William Styron wrote the novel with
Ursula Andress in mind for the part of Sophie, but Streep was very determined to get the role. After she obtained a pirated copy of the script, she went to
Alan J. Pakula and threw herself on the ground begging him to give her the part. Streep filmed the "choice" scene in one take and refused to do it again, as she found shooting the scene extremely painful and emotionally draining.
Among several notable acting awards, Streep won the
Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. She followed this success with a biographical film,
Silkwood (1983), in which she played her first real-life character, the
union activist Karen Silkwood. She discussed her preparation for the role in an interview with
Roger Ebert and said that she had met with people close to Silkwood to learn more about her, and in doing so realized that each person saw a different aspect of Silkwood.
Streep concentrated on the events of Silkwood's life and concluded, "I didn't try to turn myself into Karen. I just tried to look at what she did. I put together every piece of information I could find about her... What I finally did was look at the events in her life, and try to understand her from the inside."
Her next films were a
romantic comedy,
Falling in Love (1984) opposite
Robert De Niro, and a British drama,
Plenty (1985). Roger Ebert said of Streep's performance in
Plenty that she conveyed "great subtlety; it is hard to play an unbalanced, neurotic, self-destructive woman, and do it with such gentleness and charm... Streep creates a whole character around a woman who could have simply been a catalogue of symptoms."
(1985) starred Streep as the Danish writer
Karen Blixen and co-starred
Robert Redford. A significant critical success, the film received a 63% "fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes.
Streep co-starred with
Jack Nicholson in her next two films, the dramas
Heartburn (1986) and
Ironweed (1987), in which she sang onscreen for the first time. In
A Cry in the Dark (1988), she played the biographical role of
Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman who had been convicted of the murder of her infant daughter in which Chamberlain claimed her baby had been taken by a
dingo. Filmed in Australia, Streep won the
Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, a
Best Actress at the
Cannes Film Festival and the
New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and was nominated for several other awards.
In
She-Devil (1989), Streep played her first comedic role, opposite
Roseanne Barr. Richard Corliss, writing for
Time, commented that Streep was the "one reason" to see the film and observed that it marked a departure from the type of role for which she had been known, saying, "Surprise! Inside the
Greer Garson roles Streep usually plays, a vixenish
Carole Lombard is screaming to be cut loose."
1990s and 2000s
From 1984 to 1990, Streep won six
People's Choice Awards for Favorite Motion Picture Actress and, in 1990, was named World Favorite.
In the 1990s, Streep took a greater variety of roles, including a strung-out movie actress in a screen adaptation of
Carrie Fisher's novel
Postcards from the Edge, with
Dennis Quaid and
Shirley MacLaine. Streep and
Goldie Hawn had established a friendship and were interested in making a film together. After considering various projects, they decided upon
Thelma and Louise, until Streep's pregnancy coincided with the filming schedule, and the producers decided to proceed with
Susan Sarandon and
Geena Davis.
They subsequently filmed the farcical black comedy,
Death Becomes Her, with
Bruce Willis as their co-star.
Times Richard Corliss wrote approvingly of Streep's "wicked-witch routine" but dismissed the film as "She-Devil
with a make-over".
Biographer Karen Hollinger describes this period as a downturn in the popularity of Streep's films, which reached its nadir with the failure of
Death Becomes Her, attributing this partly to a critical perception that her comedies had been an attempt to convey a lighter image following several serious but commercially unsuccessful dramas, and more significantly to the lack of options available to an actress in her forties.
[, p. 78] Streep commented that she had limited her options by her preference to work in Los Angeles, close to her family,
a situation that she had anticipated in a 1981 interview when she commented, "By the time an actress hits her mid-forties, no one's interested in her anymore. And if you want to fit a couple of babies into that schedule as well, you've got to pick your parts with great care."
Streep appeared with
Glenn Close in the movie version of
Isabel Allende's
The House of the Spirits, the screen adaptation of
The Bridges of Madison County with [
Eastwood,
The River Wild,
Marvin's Room (with
Diane Keaton and
Leonardo DiCaprio),
One True Thing, and
Music of the Heart, in a role that required her to learn to play the
violin.
Streep is adept with foreign accents and some of her best known roles have called for them. In
The Bridges of Madison County, she played a woman from
Bari,
Italy, while in
Sophie's Choice she adopted a Polish accent. She was a
voice actor for the animated series
The Simpsons,
King of the Hill and voiced the Blue Fairy character in the
Steven Spielberg film
A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
In 2002, she costarred with
Nicolas Cage in
Spike Jonze's
Adaptation. as real-life author
Susan Orlean, and with
Nicole Kidman and
Julianne Moore in
The Hours. She also appeared with
Al Pacino and
Emma Thompson in the
HBO adaptation of
Tony Kushner's six-hour play,
Angels in America, in which she had four roles. She received her second
Emmy Award for
Angels in America, which reunited her with director
Mike Nichols (who directed her in
Silkwood,
Heartburn, and
Postcards from the Edge). She also played
Aunt Josephine in
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events with
Jim Carrey.
In addition, she appeared in
Jonathan Demme's remake of
The Manchurian Candidate, costarring
Denzel Washington, in which she played a role first performed by
Angela Lansbury. Since 2002, Streep has hosted the annual event Poetry & the Creative Mind, a benefit in support of
National Poetry Month and a program of the
Academy of American Poets. Streep co-hosted the annual
Nobel Peace Prize Concert with
Liam Neeson in Oslo, Norway, in 2001.
In 2004, Streep was awarded the
AFI Life Achievement Award by the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute, which honors an individual for a lifetime contribution to enriching American culture through motion pictures and television.
Streep's more recent film releases are
Prime (2005); the
Robert Altman film
A Prairie Home Companion, with
Lindsay Lohan and
Lily Tomlin; and the box office success
The Devil Wears Prada, with
Anne Hathaway, which earned Streep the 2007
Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy and an
Academy Award nomination.
In 2008 she appeared as Donna in the
film version of the
ABBA musical
Mamma Mia!, For this role she won the award of Best Female Performance at the
National Movie Awards (UK), and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical. She played Sister Aloysius in the 2008 film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley's
Doubt. She received both an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama for that film. She also shared the
Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress with
Anne Hathaway for the role, and won a
Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role.
In
Julie & Julia, she plays the late
Julia Child. She stars in
Nancy Meyers' romantic comedy,
It's Complicated, with
Alec Baldwin and
Steve Martin. The film began production in February 2009.
Theatre
In
New York City, she appeared in the 1976
Broadway double bill of
Tennessee Williams'
27 Wagons Full of Cotton and
Arthur Miller's
A Memory of Two Mondays. For the former, she received a
Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. Her other early Broadway credits include
Anton Chekhov's
The Cherry Orchard and the
Bertolt Brecht-
Kurt Weill musical
Happy End in which she originally appeared off-Broadway at the
Chelsea Theater Center. She received
Drama Desk Award nominations for both productions. Once Streep's film career flourished, she took a long break from stage acting.
In July 2001, Streep returned to the stage for the first time in more than twenty years, playing Arkadina in the Public Theater's revival of
Anton Chekhov's
The Seagull. The staging, directed by
Mike Nichols, also featured
Kevin Kline,
Natalie Portman,
Philip Seymour Hoffman,
Christopher Walken,
Marcia Gay Harden, and
John Goodman.
In August and September 2006, she starred onstage at
The Public Theater's production of
Mother Courage and Her Children at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.
The Public Theater production was a new translation by playwright
Tony Kushner (
Angels in America), with songs in the Weill/Brecht style written by composer
Jeanine Tesori (
Caroline, or Change); veteran director
George C. Wolfe was at the helm. Streep starred alongside
Kevin Kline and
Austin Pendleton in this three-and-a-half-hour play, in which she sang several songs and was in nearly every scene.
Music
[
2008 Av Daniel Åhs.jpg|right|thumb|Streep (fourth from left) at the premiere of [[Mamma Mia! (film)|Mamma Mia!]]]
After appearing in
Mamma Mia!, Streep's rendition of the song "
Mamma Mia" rose to popularity in the
Portuguese music charts, where it has so far peaked at #8,
[{(({cite web |title=Portuguese Music Charts|url=acharts.us/portugal_singles_top_50/2009/04}))]
adding to Streep's many achievements in the entertainment industry.
At the
35th People's Choice Awards, her version of "
Mamma Mia" won an award for "Favorite Song From A Soundtrack".
In 2008, Streep was nominated for a
Grammy Award (her fifth nomination) for her work on the
Mamma Mia! soundtrack.
Awards
Streep holds the record for the most
Academy Award nominations of any actor, having been nominated 15 times since her first nomination in 1979 for
The Deer Hunter (12 for Best Actress and 3 for Best Supporting Actress).
Meryl Streep is the most nominated performer for a
Golden Globe Award (she has 23 nominations) and is also tied with
Jack Nicholson and
Angela Lansbury for most Golden Globes overall by an actor or actress (six wins). Streep has received a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In 2003, she was awarded an honorary
César Award by the
French Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma. In 2004 at the
Moscow International Film Festival, Meryl Streep was honored with the
Stanislavsky Award for the outstanding achievement in the career of acting and devotion to the principles of
Stanislavsky's school.
In 2004, Streep received the AFI Life Achievement Award.
In 2009, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by
Princeton University.
Work
Filmography
Television
Stage
