Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress. Known for her versatility and adept accent work, she has been described as "the best actress of her generation". She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over four decades, including a record 21 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and a record 34 Golden Globe Award nominations, winning eight.
1977
Streep made her stage debut in 1975 in Trelawny of the Wells, and the following year she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for a double-bill production of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and A Memory of Two Mondays. She made her feature film debut in Julia (1977) and received her first Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter (1978). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a troubled wife in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), followed by the Academy Award for Best Actress for starring as a Holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice (1982). She continued to gain awards and critical acclaim for her film work throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Commercial success varied, with Out of Africa (1985), Death Becomes Her (1992), and The Bridges of Madison County (1995) earning the most money during that period.
Streep reclaimed her stardom in the ensuing decades with leading roles in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Doubt, Mamma Mia! (both 2008), Julie & Julia, It's Complicated (both 2009), and Into the Woods (2014). She won her third Oscar for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011). For her work on television, she won three Primetime Emmy Awards for her roles in the miniseries Holocaust (1978) and Angels in America (2003), as well as the narration in the documentary series Five Came Back (2017). Her other television work include the drama series Big Little Lies (2019) and the comedy-mystery series Only Murders in the Building (2023).
2018
Streep has been the recipient of many honorary awards, including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004, a Gala Tribute from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2008, and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2011. President Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2010 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. In 2003, the French government made her a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. She was awarded the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2017.
Early life
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. Her father was of German and Swiss descent; his lineage traced back to Loffenau, from where Streep's great-great-grandfather, Gottfried Streeb, immigrated to the United States and where one of her ancestors served as mayor (the surname was later changed to "Streep"). Another line of her father's family was from Giswil. Her mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry. Some of Streep's maternal ancestors lived in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and were descended from 17th-century English immigrants. Her maternal great-great-grandparents, Manus McFadden and Grace Strain, were natives of the Horn Head district of Dunfanaghy in Ireland.
In the drama Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep was cast opposite Dustin Hoffman as an unhappily married woman who abandons her husband and child. Streep thought that the script portrayed the female character as "too evil" and insisted that it was not representative of real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles. The makers agreed with her, and the script was revised. In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a wife with a career, and frequented the Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set, watching the interactions between parents and children. The director Robert Benton allowed Streep to write her own dialogue in two key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman, who "hated her guts" at first. Hoffman and producer Stanley R. Jaffe later spoke of Streep's tirelessness, with Hoffman commenting: "She's extraordinarily hard-working, to the extent that she's obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else, but what she's doing." The film was controversial among feminists, but it was a role which film critic Stephen Farber believed displayed Streep's "own emotional intensity", writing that she was one of the "rare performers who can imbue the most routine moments with a hint of mystery". For the film, Streep won both the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, which she famously left in the ladies' room after giving her speech. She received awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review and National Society of Film Critics for her collective work in her three film releases of 1979. Both The Deer Hunter and Kramer vs. Kramer were major commercial successes and were consecutive winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Streep's most successful film of the decade was the romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995) directed by Clint Eastwood, who adapted the film from Robert James Waller's novel of the same name. It relates the story of Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), a photographer working for National Geographic, who has a love affair with a middle-aged Italian farm wife Francesca (Streep). Though Streep disliked the novel it was based on, she found the script to be a special opportunity for an actress her age. She gained weight for the part and dressed differently from the character in the book to emulate voluptuous Italian film stars such as Sophia Loren. Both Loren and Anna Magnani were an influence in her portrayal, and Streep viewed Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962) prior to filming. The film was a box office hit and grossed over $70 million in the United States. The film, unlike the novel, was warmly received by critics. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Eastwood had managed to create "a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill", while Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal described it as "one of the most pleasurable films in recent memory". Longworth believes that Streep's performance was "crucial to transforming what could have been a weak soap opera into a vibrant work of historical fiction implicitly critiquing postwar America's stifling culture of domesticity". She considers it to have been the role in which Streep became "arguably the first middle-aged actress to be taken seriously by Hollywood as a romantic heroine".
Other ventures
After Streep starred in Mamma Mia!, her rendition of the titular song rose to popularity on the Portuguese music charts, where it peaked at number eight in October 2008. 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. Streep has narrated numerous audio books, including three by children's book author William Steig: Brae Irene, Spinky Sulks, and The One and Only Shrek!.
Streep is the spokesperson for the National Women's History Museum, to which she has made significant donations (including her fee for The Iron Lady, which was $1 million), and hosted numerous events. On October 4, 2012, Streep donated $1 million to The Public Theater in honor of both its late founder, Joseph Papp, and her friend, the author Nora Ephron. She also supports Gucci's "Chime for Change" campaign that aims to spread female empowerment.
Activism
Politically, Streep has described herself as part of the American Left. She gave a speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in support of presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. In January 2017, Streep was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 74th Golden Globe Awards, al speech that implicitly criticized President-elect Donald Trump. She argued that Trump had a very strong platform and usduring which she delivered a predominantly politiced it inappropriately to mock a disabled reporter, Serge F. Kovaleski, whom, in her words, Trump "outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back".[262] Trump responded by calling Streep "one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood," and "a Hillary flunky who lost big."
Personal life
Author Karina Longworth notes that despite her stardom, for decades Streep has managed to maintain a relatively normal personal life. Streep lived with actor John Cazale in the 1970s, caring for him after his lung cancer diagnosis until he died in March 1978. Streep said of his death:
I didn't get over it. I don't want to get over it. No matter what you do, the pain is always there in some recess of your mind, and it affects everything that happens afterwards. I think you can assimilate the pain and go on without making an obsession of it.
Streep married sculptor Don Gummer six months after Cazale's death. They have four children: musician Henry Wolfe Gummer (born 1979), and actresses Mary Willa "Mamie" Gummer (born 1983), Grace Jane Gummer (born 1986), and Louisa Jacobson Gummer (born 1991). In 1985, the family moved into a $1.8-million private estate in Connecticut and lived there until they bought a $3-million mansion in Brentwood, Los Angeles, in 1990. They later moved back to Connecticut. In 2023, it was reported that Streep and Gummer had been separated for more than six years. They were publicly last seen together at the 90th Academy Awards in 2018.
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