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
RaΓΊl JuliΓ‘, and
Measure for Measure opposite
Sam
Waterston and
John Cazale, who
became her fiancΓ©. 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 fiancΓ©, 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."
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. 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.
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 β 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, 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, 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. 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."
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
at the Academy Awards, 1988
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."
Out of Africa (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.
Time's
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. 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
Clint 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.
Streep in 2004
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 next
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
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,
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 CΓ©sar
Award by the French
AcadΓ©mie
des Arts et Techniques du CinΓ©ma. 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
References
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- citing
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- Hollinger, p. 75
- Hollinger, p. 77
- citing
- , p. 78
- }
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