It all started with simple words of encouragement from her mother: “Meryl, you’re capable. You’re so great. 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.”
This support was the seed that has sprouted one of the most acclaimed and recognisable careers in cinematic history.
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Born in 1949 in New Jersey, Meryl Streep stood out from an early age. “I was an ugly little kid with a big mouth; an obnoxious show-off.”
She first took to the stage at age 12, as part of her school’s Christmas concert. Performing O Holy Night in French, her singing entranced the audience. Soon, people were approaching Streep’s parents to suggest she take professional performance classes.
Streep was soon registered under the tutelage of Estelle Liebling. Though her voice improved, Streep learnt another very important lesson during this time. “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 eventually quit when her focus turned to boys. She became a cheerleader, worked on the school newspaper, acted in plays, and was crowned homecoming queen.
For all her popularity, Streep didn’t have many friends in high school, which she puts down to competition for the attention of the opposite sex. So it was that, when she was enrolled in the all-girl Vassar College, her life changed dramatically. “On entering, if you had asked me what feminism was. I would’ve thought it had something to do with having nice nails and clean hair. I felt absolutely great in that atmosphere. Suddenly, I felt accepted by the entire other half of the human race.”
This period of her life was also the first in which Streep seriously considered a career in acting. In 1969, she performed in the college’s rendition of Miss Julie, which saw her celebrated across campus for her ability to so seamlessly transition into character.
After graduation, Streep applied for a Master of Fine Arts at the Yale School of Drama. She paid her way through the course by working as a waitress and typist, while simultaneously appearing in over a dozen stage shows. Her drive had mutated into obsession, and overwork. She developed ulcers, and was so fatigued that she considered leaving acting for law.
In 1975, she moved to New York, and in between performances, established a relationship with actor John Cazale, who had recently found success through his performance in The Godfather.
Her first major success came with the play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, in which she performed as two major characters. The audience was stunned by the realisation that one actor was playing such diverse roles in a single play, and this amazement culminated in a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play nomination.
This same year, Streep watched Robert De Niro’s film Taxi Driver and declared “that’s the kind of actor I want to be when I grow up”. She began unsuccessfully auditioning for a range of roles, including a lead part in Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong. When she entered the room, Laurentiis exclaimed in Italian to his son “This is so ugly. Why did you bring me this”, not realising that Streep spoke the language. She replied adamantly “I’m very sorry that I’m not as beautiful as I should be but, you know, this is it”.
Her first feature film role can in 1977’s Julia. The experience was dreadful, and she decided that she hated the filmmaking business. She was leaving it for good.
That was until De Niro himself spotted Streep in her stage production of The Cheery Orchard, and asked if she would play the role of his girlfriend in The Deer Hunter. Her partner, Cazale, was also cast in the film, even as he was dying from lung cancer. Streep took on the role, and then remained to tend to Cazale for the rest of production.
The Deer Hunter was a controversial success. It opened Streep up to a whole new audience, and marked her first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Cazale died the following year, shortly after Streep travelled to Europe to perform in the mini-series Holocaust, for which she received an Emmy Award.
Over the next twelve months, Streep worked in both theatre and film, the former being her priority. She starred in The Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park, and had a small role in Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
It was her next role, as a mother embroiled in a custody battle for her child in the film Kramer VS Kramer, that truly defined Streep as a creative powerhouse. She was determined to make the performance her own, and so frequented the suburbs where the film was set to get a better understanding of life there. It was with this understanding that she declared much of what her character did unbelievable, convincing the producers to have the script rewritten. Streep wrote dialogue for two of her most important scenes herself, much to the chagrin of fellow lead actor Dustin Hoffman.
Streep went on to win the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, along with a variety of other awards for the three films she worked on that released in 1979.
Newsweek declared Streep “A Star for the 80s“, but she dismissed much of the attention coming her way as excessive.
Nevertheless, Streep moved from success to success, with performances in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sophie’s Choice (a role for which she threw herself on the ground in front of director Alan J. Pakula to beg for), and Silkwood.
In 1985, Out of Africa defined Streep as a true superstar, but the success actually resulted in voracious attacks on her work, especially due to her demand of $4 million a film. Unlike other famous faces of the time, Streep’s technical finesse was of such top class that critics claimed they could ‘literally see her acting’.
Streep thinks otherwise. “Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.”
A decade of obscure and poorly-received films followed, before Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County. She disliked the book the script was adapted from, but found the role a unique opportunity for an actress of her age. Critic Karina Longworth defined Streep in the role as “arguably the first middle-aged actress to be taken seriously by Hollywood as a romantic heroine”.
In the early 2000s, Streep returned to the stage for the first time in over two decades, starring alongside the likes of Kevin Kline and Natalie Portman in a revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.
On the screen she played award winning parts ranging from journalist Susan Orlean in Adaptation, and Clarissa in The Hours, a New Yorker preparing a party for her AIDS-stricken former lover.
In 2004, she was award an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. This was followed by a mix of commercially successful films like The Devil Wears Prada and Mamma Mia! (her highest-grossing film to date), to dramas like Doubt and Julie & Julia, which showed off Streep’s impeccable ability to become a variety of characters with grace.
“It’s hard to imagine that there was a time before Meryl Streep was the greatest-living actress,” wrote Variety Fair in 2015, and when you look at her expansive range of awards and nominations, it’s easy to see why. Streep has been nominated an unprecedented 409 times for her work, and has won on 157 occasions. She has three Academy Awards from 19 nominations (the most ever), eight Golden Globes from 23 nominations (again, the most ever), and in 1998 was given a Crystal Award from the Women in Film Awards, an honour granted to outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.
A full list of Streep’s awards can be found here.
Outside of acting, Streep is a spokesperson for the National Women’s History Museum, and supports Gucci’s Chime for Change initiative, aimed to further empowerment of women. When asked if she was a feminist, Streep replied “I am a humanist, I am for nice easy balance”.
She has established two scholarships – the Meryl Streep Endowed Scholarship for English majors, and the Joan Hertzberg Endowed Scholarship for maths majors – and in 2015 created The Writers Lab to fund women screenwriters over the age of 40.
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Though it was the subject of tough criticism at the height of her career, Meryl Streep’s ability to become her characters is what defines her as a great actress.
Her dedication to the craft, and the inspiration she provides actors across the world, is sure to be celebrated for a long time to come.