Meryl Streep

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• Born: 22 June 1949
• Birthplace: Summit, New Jersey
• Best Known As: The multi-Oscared star of Out of Africa and The Devil Wears Prada

Meryl Streep has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards -- more than any other actress in history. Streep came to fame in 1979, when she won an Emmy for her performance in the TV miniseries Holocaust and was nominated for her first Oscar for the 1978 film The Deer Hunter (starring Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken). In 1980 Streep won an Oscar for the 1979 divorce drama Kramer v. Kramer (co-starring Dustin Hoffman). She was nominated again for The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and won again for Alan Pakula's Sophie's Choice (1982, based on the novel by William Styron). Nominations followed for : Silkwood (1983, with Cher); Out of Africa (1985, with Robert Redford); Ironweed (1987, with Jack Nicholson); A Cry in the Dark (1988, also known as Evil Angels); and Postcards From the Edge (1991, with Shirley MacLaine).

In spite of successful forays into comedy, Streep is considered a "serious" actress -- talented, well-bred, intelligent and a specialist in accents and dialects. Streep worked less and raised a family during the 1990s, but still turned in critically-acclaimed performances in television and film and racked up more nominations for The Bridges of Madison County (1995, opposite Clint Eastwood), One True Thing (1998, with William Hurt), Music From the Heart (1999), Adaptation (2002, starring Nicolas Cage), The Devil Wears Prada (2006, starring Anne Hathaway) and Doubt (2008, with Philip Seymour Hoffman). She played jolly chef Julia Child in the 2009 film Julie and Julia (with Amy Adams).

Streep married sculptor Donald Gummer in 1978. They have four children: Henry (b. 1979), Mary (nicknamed Mamie, b. 1983), Grace (b. 1986), and Louisa (b. 1991). Mamie Gummer is also an actress... Before her marriage to Gummer, Streep was engaged to actor John Cazale, who played Fredo in The Godfather. They never married, as Cazale died of bone cancer in 1978... Streep's 2003 Oscar nomination for Adaptation was her 13th, establishing the new record for an actress. Katharine Hepburn had 12 nominations and four wins; animator and producer Walt Disney holds the all-time Oscar nomination record, with 64... Academy Award ceremonies are held the year after films are released, which is why (for instance) Streep's Oscar for the 1978 film The Deer Hunter was given in 1979.

A versatile screen actress known for immersing herself in her characters, Meryl Streep (born 1949) distinguished herself with two Academy Awards and has been nominated 13 times, more than any other actor in history. Intelligent, commanding, and unafraid to play unglamorous and difficult women,Streep embodied an increasing realism for female characters in major studio films.

Standout Thespian

Streep was born in Summit, New Jersey, on June 22, 1949, to wealthy parents. Her mother was a commercial artist and her father a pharmaceutical executive. She has two younger brothers. Raised in Bernardsville, New Jersey, she took operatic voice lessons as a child and started acting at Bernards High School. She was also a varsity cheerleader, Homecoming Queen, and an academic stalwart.

Though her ambition was to be an interpreter for the United Nations, Streep continued her theater work at Vassar, where she was the star of the drama department. She spent one semester at Dartmouth and then enrolled in the prestigious Yale Drama School. There she appeared in more than three dozen productions with the Yale Repertory Theater and became well-known for her astounding range and the intensity of her performances.

Streep went directly from Yale to the New York theater scene. She appeared at the Public Theater - its impresario Joseph Papp was her mentor - in the musical Alice in Concert. Soon Streep arrived on Broadway, and she was nominated for a Tony Award in 1977 for Tennessee Williams's 27 Wagons Full of Cotton.

While playing a lead role in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure for Measure, she met and fell in love with actor John Cazale, with whom she would work in The Deer Hunter. They never married, but she cared for him until he died of cancer in 1978. A few months later, she married sculptor Don Gummer.

A Woman of Substance

In 1977, Streep made her debut on the small screen in the made-for-TV movie The Deadliest Season and on the big screen in Julia. In 1978, she won an Emmy Award for playing a Jewish woman persecuted by the Nazis in the TV miniseries Holocaust. Also that year, Streep was nominated for the first time for an Academy Award for a small but stirring role in The Deer Hunter as a woman in love with two men during the Vietnam conflict.

The Deer Hunter made many Hollywood directors eager to work with Streep. The first to grab her was Woody Allen, who cast her as his hostile ex-wife in Manhattan. In that role and in others to come, Streep demonstrated she was comfortable portraying an unlikable character.

In fact, Streep was perfectly suited to play the new roles that were opening up because of the feminist movement. Though Streep was a blonde with elegant features, she was rarely glamorous, and she could easily suppress her beauty and look ordinary. Playing a woman conflicted about divorcing her husband in Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, Streep embodied the difficult choices facing millions of women. "In 1979, nobody was talking about depression," Streep later told Entertainment Weekly 's Mark Harris, "but this woman probably thought about killing herself once or twice a day." One of the first movies to treat divorce from an egalitarian standpoint, Kramer vs. Kramer was a cultural landmark in American film. Streep's portrayal merited an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and made her a household name.

Also in 1979, Streep showed her versatility by portraying a sexy attorney who snares a politician in The Seduction of Joe Tynan. Two years later, she was nominated again for an Academy Award for a supporting role, playing two characters (the mistress of a Victorian gentleman and a modern actress playing her) in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Critics and the public, especially female moviegoers, embraced her. Already hailed as the greatest actress of her time, she won the Academy Award as Best Actress for Sophie's Choice in 1982. In that film, she adopted a convincing Polish accent after enrolling in a Berlitz course.

Oscar's Favorite

What was unusual about Streep was not just her willingness to take on difficult roles, but her ability to utterly disappear into her characters. A thorough researcher, she could adopt a different era, nationality, accent, or personality. Some critics, however, most notably Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, criticized her work as too stylized. To such detractors, Streep came off as a masterful technician who lacked warmth and genuine emotion. Reacting to this common criticism, Streep, in an interview in the Washington Times in 2002, said that she approached her roles instinctually rather than analytically: "I like to think I am the opposite of technical. I only worked once with a voice coach, and it was a disaster."

However she had accomplished it, in five years Streep had gone from a virtual unknown to the pinnacle of Hollywood stardom. In the noir thriller Still of the Night, Streep again attempted a seductive character, but did not fare well. "I didn't know what I was doing in that!" she told Entertainment Weekly 's Harris. "I didn't know who my character was. I hate noir. It's not about playing a person, but a representation."

Able to pick and choose her roles, she next took on an openly political character, playing a nuclear power industry whistleblower in the biographical picture Silkwood. To this role she brought a convincing recklessness and courage, and once again she was among the Best Actress nominees on Oscar night.

Again switching gears, Streep followed up with a romantic role opposite Robert DeNiro in the film Falling in Love, which flopped despite featuring the biggest male and female stars of the day - possibly because audiences could not picture either of them in a romantic pairing. Streep returned to serious drama in 1985 with Plenty, playing a woman in the French Resistance who has trouble piecing her life back together after World War II. The next year, in Out of Africa, Streep gave another Oscar-nominated performance as a Danish woman having an affair in Kenya. Her next picture was the comic romance Heartburn, which was filmed while she was pregnant.

Streep got her by-now-customary Best Actress nominations in 1987 and 1988 for Ironweed, in which she played a Depression-era alcoholic, and for A Cry in the Dark, in which she took on the thankless role of a much-reviled Australian woman accused of murdering her own child. She later told Liz Smith in an interview in Good Housekeeping that this was her favorite role, explaining: "I'm drawn to disagreeable women… . I loved trying to put somebody out there that you wouldn't normally look at or care about." Ty Burr, in a 1996 Entertainment Weekly article that named Streep number 37 among the 100 greatest movie stars, opined: "She's the movie star as medicine: good for you, but not much fun… . She inhabits her roles with a craft that can occasionally seem academic. "

Ranged Far and Wide

With her career direction in question, Streep decided to try comedy. She gave her voice to a character in the animated television sitcom The Simpsons. Streep shocked almost everyone by appearing opposite comic Roseanne Barr in She-Devil, a notable flop. Next, she played Carrie Fisher's alter ego in Fisher's semi-autobiographical Postcards from the Edge - the first movie she made in Hollywood. It netted her another Oscar nomination. She followed that with a starring role in Richard Brooks' comedy Defending Your Life. None of these comic roles attracted much attention, but Streep was funny in the over-the-top satire Death Becomes Her, playing a zombie-like character opposite Goldie Hawn.

Having proven she could act in comedies, Streep returned to drama in the harrowing The House of the Spirits, in which her ten-year-old daughter Mamie appeared. She decided to show her children she could be adventurous by doing her own whitewater rafting in her next film, The River Wild, a harrowing tale about a family expedition that goes wrong.

Streep had to cry for entire days during the filming of the tear-jerking romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County, a guaranteed box-office success because it adapted one of the decade's most popular novels. For this part, playing an Iowa farm wife wooed by a photographer, she put on weight and shed makeup. After a five-year absence from Oscar night, the role earned her a tenth Academy Award nomination.

In 1996, Streep played the mother of a teenage boy accused of murder in Before and After. The same year, she appeared in Marvin's Room, playing the mother of Leonardo DiCaprio. During her career, Streep also played the real-life role of mother on a secluded 89-acre estate in rural Connecticut with Gummer and their four children: Henry, Mary Wills (Mamie), Grace, and Louisa. She turned down theater roles because they would take her away at night, and she tried to maintain a normal family life as much as possible, guarding her children's privacy. In 1998, she told Smith in the Good Housekeeping interview: "I always feel like my life is straining at the seams… . Basically I've now decided I can do one movie a year."

Discussing her daughters and how they influenced her acting choices, Streep told Dana Kennedy of Entertainment Weekly: "I want them to see not just examples of beautiful young women, I want them to see that women are beautiful throughout their lives and important and formidable and exciting, because I think those fantasies are what you build your dreams on. I know I did when I was a kid." Kennedy observed that "by sheer strength of personality," Streep "could probably command the U.S. armed forces in addition to tending to her acting career, her husband, and her four children."

Second Wind

By the mid-1990s, Streep's flirtation with comedy was over, and she had returned to playing the kind of drama that had made her so famous, and with an assured maturity. She played a terminally ill wife and mother in One True Thing, garnering another Oscar nomination, and added an Irish brogue to her linguistic repertoire in Dancing at Lughnasa. She played an innercity violin teacher in Music of the Heart, netting her a 12th Academy Award nomination.

After lending her voice talents to a role in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in 2001, Streep returned to the stage to star in a Broadway adaptation of The Seagull, directed by Mike Nichols. Newsweek 's Cathleen McGuigan said "Streep commands the stage - but never steals scenes - in a wonderfully funny, wrenching performance."

Having turned 50, Streep was determined not to fade away as too many great actresses do in middle age. In 2002, she returned to the forefront with two critically acclaimed performances. In the offbeat comedy Adaptation, she played New Yorker columnist Susan Orlean, who falls for the subject of her article and book, a scraggly gap-toothed orchid thief in Florida. She won a Golden Globe as a supporting actress and also landed a Golden Globe nomination for her standout performance in The Hours, in which she played a New York book editor throwing a party for a longtime friend dying of AIDS. About that portrayal, David Ansen of Newsweek raved: "Few actresses can express their inner lives without a line of dialogue as eloquently as Streep: her warm, flustered performance allows us to become mind readers." Her Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Adaptation allowed her to pass Katherine Hepburn as the most Oscar-nominated actor in movie history. Director Alan Pakula said: "If there's a heaven for directors, it would be to direct Meryl Streep your whole life."

For her part, Streep told Daily Variety that she was proud of the integrity of her career, of "this eccentric, quirky collection of movies I've done, all with their idiosyncratic pleasures. They've never said about my movies, 'What's the sequel?' and 'Can we merchandise this?' "

Utterly rejecting the idea that she approached acting mechanically, Streep said in the Washington Times interview: "We need art like food. I'm not religious but I think of my work - this is so pretentious - a bit like going to the altar. Like going to God… . You can't get ready for it, I believe. Acting is surrender. All you really have to do is listen."

Books

Thomson, David, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Periodicals

Daily Variety, November 18, 2002; January 8, 2003.

Entertainment Weekly, February 11, 1994; Fall 1996; March 24, 2000.

Good Housekeeping, September 1998.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service (Orlando Sentinel), January 16, 2003.

Newsweek, August 20, 2001.

People Weekly, June 26, 1995; January 27, 1997.

Washington Times, February 20, 2002;

Online

"Meryl Streep," All Movie Guide,http://www.allmovie.com(February 7, 2003).

For more information on Meryl Streep, visit Britannica.com.

Quotes:

"You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing."

"The work will stand, no matter what."

• Born: Jun 22, 1949 in Summit, New Jersey
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '80s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Comedy
• Career Highlights: A Cry in the Dark, Kramer vs. Kramer, Holocaust
• First Major Screen Credit: The Deer Hunter (1978)

Biography

Sydney Pollack -- one of Meryl Streep's collaborators time and again -- once proclaimed her the most gifted film actress of the late 20th century. Most insiders would concur with this assessment. To avid moviegoers, she represents the essence of onscreen dramatic art, and classifying her as a contemporary reincarnation of Eleonora Duse or Sarah Bernhardt would not overstate the case. To be certain, Streep's filmography claims its share of near misses and outright disasters (She-Devil, Falling in Love, Death Becomes Her) -- like Dustin Hoffman, she thrived in the '70s and early '80s, but seemed somewhat crippled in the late '80s and early '90s by the paucity of eloquent scripts. But the intelligence and refinement of her craft endure. For, also like Hoffman (and De Niro), she demonstrates a transcendent ability to plunge into her characters and lose herself inside of them, transforming herself physically to meet the demands of her roles. A luminous blonde with nearly translucent pale skin, intelligent blue eyes, and an elegant facial bone structure, Streep sustains a fragile, fleeting beauty that allows her to travel the spectrum between earthily plain (Ironweed), and ethereally glamorous and radiant (Manhattan, Heartburn).

Born June 22, 1949, in Summit, NJ, Streep took operatic voice lessons, and subsequently cultivated a fascination with acting while she attended Bernards High School. Streep graced several school productions (she took an early bow as Daisy Mae in Lil' Abner) , earned decent grades, and became popular among fellow students (she joined the cheerleaders and won the title of homecoming queen). Upon high-school graduation, Streep studied drama at Vassar, Dartmouth, and Yale, where she appeared in 30 to 40 productions with the Yale Repertory Theater. With a five-star education and years of collegiate stage work under her belt, Streep headed for the New York footlights and launched her off-Broadway career. Streep's performance in Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, for which she received a Tony nomination, constitutes a particularly strong theatrical highlight from this period. She made her television debut in Robert Markowitz's The Deadliest Season (1977). That year she also appeared onscreen for the first time in Fred Zinnmann's Julia (1977) as Anna Marie, opposite heavyweights Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Hal Holbrook. The following year, Streep picked up an Emmy for her performance in Marvin J. Chomsky's miniseries Holocaust. She first teamed with De Niro in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978). Despite a minor role in the epic, she played the part with an energetic sensitivity that earned her only the first of innumerable Oscar nominations.

Around this time, Streep became engaged to the diminutive performer John Cazale (whom she met on the set of the Cimino film), predominantly known for his evocations of Fredo Corleone in The Godfather and Sal in Dog Day Afternoon. Tragically, this marriage was ill-fated from day one, Cazale's frail body ridden with bone cancer. Forty-two at the time, he passed away in March 1978, nine months prior to the premiere of The Deer Hunter. Not six months later, Streep wed Don Gummer, unaffiliated with Hollywood in any capacity. To date, the couple are still married and have four children; together, they have sustained a longer marriage than almost anyone in Hollywood.

Streep next appeared as Woody Allen's ruthless lesbian ex-wife in his elegiac comedy drama Manhattan (1979) and Alan Alda's Southern mistress in the scathing political satire The Seduction of Joe Tynan. Her shattering interpretation of the scarred and torn Joanna Kramer opposite Dustin Hoffman in Robert Benton's heartbreaking divorce saga Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1980 -- which she famously left on top of a toilet at the festivities -- alongside a plethora of L.A. Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, and Golden Globe Awards for the Allen, Benton, and Alda films.

Streep continued her ascent over the next decade by establishing herself as Hollywood's top box-office draw and a critical darling. Her double performance in the innovative Karel Reisz/Harold Pinter triumph The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), her gut-wrenching interpretation of the titular Holocaust survivor in Alan J. Pakula's haunting adaptation Sophie's Choice (1982), and her thoughtful evocation of Karen Silkwood in Mike Nichols' drama Silkwood were highlights of the period. In the latter, she portrays a real-life victimized nuclear-plant worker who mysteriously disappears just prior to turning in crucial evidence against her employers. A observation about Silkwood by Roger Ebert illustrates the almost-unprecedented amount of research that Streep poured into the role of Karen, as she does for all of her films: "Silkwood is played by Meryl Streep, in another of her great performances, and there's a tiny detail in the first moments of the movie that reveals how completely Streep has thought through the role. Silkwood walks into the factory, punches her time card, automatically looks at her own wristwatch, and then shakes her wrist: It's a self-winding watch, I guess. That little shake of the wrist is an actor's choice. There are a lot of them in this movie, all almost as invisible as the first one."

Streep's decision to headline Sydney Pollack's lush epic Out of Africa (1985), as Karen Blixen, sustained her reputation (she held the film together with her brilliant performance and picked up an Academy nom for Best Actress), but raised the bar of expectation almost cruelly high for her. This could partially account for a series of slight disappointments in Streep's career during the late '80s and early '90s. With the exception of Hector Babenco's astonishing Ironweed, Streep headlined several efforts that, if they didn't exactly constitute unqualified disasters, invariably disappointed audiences and critics. These included the lackluster 1986 Ephron/Nichols soaper Heartburn, Susan Seidelman's grotesque 1991 comedy She-Devil, Nichols' Postcards from the Edge (also 1991), and Robert Zemeckis' effects-laden piece of fluff Death Becomes Her (1992). Critics noticed, but responded too viciously. The typically acid-tongued Pauline Kael derided the aloofness that she felt Streep projected onscreen during this period, comparing her to a technician or an automaton rather than a living, breathing, and fallible actress. Some even had the gall to attack Streep's extraordinary ability to convincingly reproduce accents. Never one to feel daunted, Streep took these criticisms as a challenge, further expanding her range by lending her voice to a guest character on the satirical Fox animated television series The Simpsons in the early '90s. In 1994, she again surprised her fans when she appeared as a muscular expert whitewater rafter who must fight a raging river and two dangerous fugitives to save her family in the action thriller River Wild (1994). In interviews, she said she did the film because she wanted to have an adventure like Harrison Ford and to overcome a few of her own fears.

Streep returned to the depth and multifacetedness of her early roles -- with much concomitant success -- when she took a more low-key role as a dowdy, Earthbound farm wife who finds Illicit love with an itinerant photographer (Clint Eastwood) in The Bridges of Madison County. Following the critical and commercial heights of Bridges, Streep co-headlined Marvin's Room with Diane Keaton and Leonardo DiCaprio before picking up yet another Oscar nomination for her performance as a terminally ill wife and mother in Carl Franklin's One True Thing (1998).

Streep's follow-up, a screen adaptation of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1998), was a decidedly quieter affair, in which Streep once again showcased her uncanny aptitude for foreign accents -- in this case, a thick Irish brogue. Indifferent about glory and praise, Streep then signed on to replace Madonna as the lead in 1999's Music of the Heart, tackling what outwardly appeared to be a cookbook Hollywood plot (a teacher on a mission to teach violin to a class of inner-city youth in Harlem) with absolute commitment, teaching herself to play the violin by practicing six hours a day for eight weeks. Though she would play things relatively low-key as the new millennium began (such as lending her voice to the Blue Mecha in Steven Spielberg's A.I.), Streep proved she was still an actress of considerable dramatic power when she hit audiences with the back-to-back success d'estimes Adaptation and The Hours as the curtain fell on 2002. Earning an Oscar nomination for the former and a Golden Globe nomination for the latter, Streep's remarkable range connected with audiences in her respective roles as an author looking to recapture the unpredictibility of youth and a woman who prepares a final party for a close friend (Ed Harris) and soon-to-be AIDS victim.

On the heels of this success, Streep won an Emmy in 2004 for her participation in longtime friend and collaborator Mike Nichols' Angels in America, a mini-series adaptation of Tony Kushner's acclaimed play about the AIDS crisis of the '80s. In this film, Streep delivered a triple role: Hannah Pitt, Ethel Rosenberg, and Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz. Streep soon afterward won even greater audience and critic approval for her biting role as a corporate and political conspirator in Jonathan Demme's remake of the 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate. Streep followed this up with a part in the lighthearted comedy Prime, as a good-natured psychologist who discovers that the man her patient is sexually involved with is none other than Streep's adult son. Since neither of the frisky lovebirds realize their mutual connection to Streep's character, the poor therapist must endure hearing all about her son's sexual exploits in order to fulfill her obligation to her patient. The film was a moderate success, but as usual, Streep's performance was much better received than the motion picture itself. Never one to be typecast, however, Streep moved immediately on to play one-half of a sister singing team (alongside Lily Tomlin) in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion (2006), and -- that same year -- the evil and abusive boss of Anne Hathaway in David Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada. Another "the best thing about the movie" performance, this one earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, as well as the accordant Oscar nomination, her fourteenth.

In 2007 Streep starred in a pair of timely dramas about the Iraq War, Lions for Lambs and Rendition. Both of those films failed to catch on at the box office, but that problem would not resurface for her next movie - 2008's Mamma Mia! The adaptation of the smash stage musical shattered box-office records, becoming the highest grossing film in the history of the United Kingdom, and the biggest American hit of her illustrious career. She followed that up with the lead role in John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his award-winning play Doubt, a performance that earned her fifteenth acting nomination from the Academy, as well as nods from the Screen Actors Guild, and the Hollywood Foreign Press. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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