136 Facts About Meryl Streep

Mary Louise Streep was born on June 22,1949 and is an American actress.

Meryl Streep has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over four decades, including a record 21 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and a record 32 Golden Globe Award nominations, winning eight.

Meryl Streep made her stage debut in 1975 Trelawny of the Wells and received a Tony Award nomination the following year for a double-bill production of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and A Memory of Two Mondays.

Meryl Streep won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a troubled wife in Kramer vs Kramer and went on to establish herself as a film actor in the 1980s.

Meryl Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress for starring as a Holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice and had her biggest commercial success to that point in Out of Africa.

Meryl Streep continued to gain awards, and critical praise, for her work in the late 1980s and 1990s, but commercial success was varied, with the comedy Death Becomes Her and the drama The Bridges of Madison County, her biggest earners in that period.

Meryl Streep won her third Academy Award for her portrayal of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

Meryl Streep was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004, Gala Tribute from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2008, and Kennedy Center Honor in 2011 for her contribution to American culture, through performing arts.

Meryl Streep was awarded the Golden Globe Cecil B DeMille Award in 2017.

Mary Louise Meryl Streep was born on June 22,1949, in Summit, New Jersey.

Meryl Streep is the daughter of artist Mary Wilkinson Streep and pharmaceutical executive Harry William Streep, Jr.

Meryl Streep has two younger brothers, Harry William Streep III and Dana David Streep, both actors.

Meryl Streep was raised as a Presbyterian in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and attended Cedar Hill Elementary School and the Oak Street School, which was a junior high school at that time.

At age 12, Meryl Streep was selected to sing at a school recital, leading to her having opera lessons from Estelle Liebling.

Meryl Streep had many Catholic school friends, and regularly attended Mass.

Meryl Streep was a high school cheerleader for the Bernards High School Mountaineers and was chosen as the homecoming queen her senior year.

Meryl Streep played a variety of roles on stage, from Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.

Meryl Streep was a student of choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, whom she introduced at the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors.

Meryl Streep disapproved of some of the acting exercises she was asked to do, remarking that one professor taught the emotional recall technique by delving into personal lives in a way she found "obnoxious".

Meryl Streep enrolled as a visiting student at Dartmouth College in 1970, and received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the college in 1981.

Meryl Streep moved to New York City in 1975, and was cast by Joseph Papp in a production of Trelawny of the Wells at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, opposite Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow.

Meryl Streep went on to appear in five more roles in her first year in New York, including in Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival productions of Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew with Raul Julia, and Measure for Measure opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale.

Meryl Streep entered into a relationship with Cazale at this time, and resided with him until his death three years later.

Meryl Streep starred in the musical Happy End on Broadway, and won an Obie for her performance in the off-Broadway play Alice at the Palace.

Meryl Streep received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Meryl Streep received Drama Desk Award nominations for both productions.

However, Meryl Streep cites Fonda as having a lasting influence on her as an actress, and has credited her as "open[ing] probably more doors than I probably even know about".

Cazale, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, was cast in the film, and Meryl Streep took on the role of a "vague, stock girlfriend" to remain with Cazale for the duration of filming.

Pauline Kael, who later became a strong critic of Meryl Streep, remarked that she was a "real beauty" who brought much freshness to the film with her performance.

Meryl Streep found the material to be "unrelentingly noble" and professed to have taken on the role for financial gain.

Meryl Streep travelled to Germany and Austria for filming while Cazale remained in New York.

Meryl Streep won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance.

Meryl Streep played the supporting role of Leilah in Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others in a May 1978 "Theater in America" television production for PBS's Great Performances.

Meryl Streep replaced Glenn Close, who played the role in the Off-Broadway production at the Phoenix Theatre.

Meryl Streep performed the role of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park, and played a supporting role in Manhattan for Woody Allen.

Meryl Streep later said that Allen did not provide her with a complete script, giving her only the six pages of her own scenes, and did not permit her to improvise a word of her dialogue.

Meryl 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.

In preparing for the part, Meryl 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 Meryl Streep to write her own dialogue in two key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman, who "hated her guts" at first.

For Kramer vs Kramer, Meryl 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.

Meryl Streep 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 her three film releases of 1979.

In 1979, Meryl Streep began workshopping Alice in Concert, a musical version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with writer and composer Elizabeth Swados and director Joseph Papp; the show was put on at New York's Public Theater from December 1980.

Meryl Streep was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine with the headline "A Star for the 80s"; Jack Kroll commented,.

Meryl Streep denounced her fervent media coverage at the time as "excessive hype".

The story within a story drama The French Lieutenant's Woman was Meryl Streep's first leading role.

Meryl Streep developed an English accent for the part, but considered herself a misfit for the role: " I couldn't help wishing that I was more beautiful".

Meryl Streep was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work.

Greater success came later in the year when Meryl Streep starred in the drama Sophie's Choice, portraying a Polish survivor of Auschwitz caught in a love triangle between a young naive writer and a Jewish intellectual.

William Styron wrote the novel with Ursula Andress in mind for the role of Sophie, but Meryl Streep was determined to get the role.

Meryl Streep filmed the "choice" scene in one take and refused to do it again, finding it extremely painful and emotionally exhausting.

Meryl Streep plays the Brooklyn scenes with an enchanting Polish-American accent, and she plays the flashbacks in subtitled German and Polish.

In 1983, Meryl Streep played her first non-fictional character, the nuclear whistleblower and labor union activist Karen Silkwood, who died in a suspicious car accident while investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant, in Mike Nichols' biographical film Silkwood.

Meryl Streep felt a personal connection to Silkwood, and in preparation, she met with people close to the woman, and in doing so realized that each person saw a different aspect of her personality.

Meryl Streep next played opposite Robert De Niro in the romance Falling in Love, which was poorly received, and portrayed a fighter for the French Resistance during World War II in the British drama Plenty, adapted from the play by David Hare.

Meryl Streep creates a whole character around a woman who could have simply been a catalogue of symptoms.

Meryl Streep had spent much time listening to tapes of Blixen, and began speaking in an old-fashioned and aristocratic fashion, which Pollack thought excessive.

Unlike other stars at the time, such as Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep "never seemed to play herself", and certain critics felt her technical finesse led people to literally see her acting.

In 1989, Meryl Streep lobbied to play the lead role in Oliver Stone's adaption of the play Evita, but two months before filming was due to commence, she dropped out, citing "exhaustion" initially, although it was later revealed that there was a dispute over her salary.

Meryl Streep found the role in She-Devil, a satire that parodied societal obsession with beauty and cosmetic surgery, in which she played a glamorous writer.

Biographer Karen Hollinger described the early 1990s as a downturn in the popularity of Meryl Streep's films, 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.

Meryl Streep criticized the film industry for downplaying the importance of women both on screen and off.

Meryl Streep persuaded writer David Koepp to re-write several of the scenes, particularly the one in which her character has an affair with a younger man, which she believed was "unrealistically male" in its conception.

Longworth considers Death Becomes Her to have been "the most physical performance Meryl Streep had yet committed to screen, all broad weeping, smirking, and eye-rolling".

Meryl Streep later admitted to having disliked filming the scenes involving heavy special effects, and vowed never to work again on a film with heavy special effects.

Meryl Streep gained weight for the part and dressed differently from the character in the book to emulate voluptuous Italian film stars such as Sophia Loren.

Longworth believes that Meryl 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".

Meryl Streep 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".

Meryl Streep played the estranged sister of Bessie, a woman battling leukemia, in Marvin's Room, an adaptation of the play by Scott McPherson.

In 1998, Meryl Streep first appeared opposite Michael Gambon and Catherine McCormack in Pat O'Connor's Dancing at Lughnasa, another Broadway adaptation, which was entered into the Venice Film Festival in its year of release.

Meryl Streep portrayed Roberta Guaspari, a real-life New Yorker who found passion and enlightenment teaching violin to the inner-city kids of East Harlem, in the music drama Music of the Heart.

Meryl Streep replaced Madonna, who dropped out of the project before filming began due to creative differences with director Wes Craven.

Meryl Streep received nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance.

In 2001, Meryl 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, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, John Goodman, Marcia Gay Harden, Stephen Spinella, Debra Monk, Larry Pine and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Meryl Streep appeared alongside Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, based on the 1999 novel by Michael Cunningham.

In 2003, Meryl Streep re-united with Mike Nichols to star with Al Pacino and Emma Thompson in the HBO's adaptation of Tony Kushner's six-hour play Angels in America, the story of two couples whose relationships dissolve amidst the backdrop of Reagan era politics.

Meryl Streep, who was cast in four roles in the miniseries, received her second Emmy Award and fifth Golden Globe for her performance.

Meryl Streep appeared in Jonathan Demme's moderately successful remake of The Manchurian Candidate in 2004, co-starring Denzel Washington, playing the role of a woman who is both a US senator and the manipulative, ruthless mother of a vice-presidential candidate.

Meryl Streep was next cast in the comedy film Prime, directed by Ben Younger.

Roger Ebert noted how Meryl Streep had "that ability to cut through the solemnity of a scene with a zinger that reveals how all human effort is, after all, comic at some level".

Meryl Streep starred alongside Kevin Kline and Austin Pendleton in this three-and-a-half-hour play.

Commercially, Meryl Streep fared better with a role in The Devil Wears Prada, a loose screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel of the same name.

Meryl Streep portrayed the powerful and demanding Miranda Priestly, fashion magazine editor.

Meryl Streep portrayed a wealthy university patron in Chen Shi-zheng's much-delayed feature drama Dark Matter, a film about a Chinese science graduate student who becomes violent after dealing with academic politics at a US university.

Meryl Streep played a US government official who investigates an Egyptian foreign national suspected of terrorism in the political thriller Rendition, directed by Gavin Hood.

Keen to get involved in a thriller film, Meryl Streep welcomed the opportunity to star in a film genre for which she was not usually offered scripts, and immediately signed on to the project.

Meryl Streep had a role in Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, a film about the connection between a platoon of United States soldiers in Afghanistan, a US senator, a reporter, and a California college professor.

Co-starring Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, Colin Firth, Julie Walters, and Christine Baranski, Meryl Streep played a single mother and a former girl-group singer, whose daughter, a bride-to-be who never met her father, invites three likely paternal candidates to her wedding on the idyllic Greek island of Skopelos known in the film as Kalokairi.

In Nancy Meyers' romantic comedy It's Complicated, Meryl Streep starred with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin.

Meryl Streep lent her voice to Mrs Felicity Fox in Wes Anderson's stop-motion film Fantastic Mr Fox.

Meryl Streep re-teamed with Mamma Mia director Phyllida Lloyd on The Iron Lady, a British biographical film about Margaret Thatcher, which takes a look at the Prime Minister during the Falklands War and her years in retirement.

Meryl Streep, who attended a session of the House of Commons to see British Members of Parliament in action in preparation for her role as Thatcher, called her casting "a daunting and exciting challenge".

Meryl Streep re-united with Prada director David Frankel on the set of the romantic comedy-drama film Hope Springs, co-starring Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell.

In 2013, Meryl Streep starred alongside Julia Roberts and Ewan McGregor in the black comedy drama August: Osage County about a dysfunctional family that re-unites into the familial house when their patriarch suddenly disappears.

Meryl Streep was nominated for another Golden Globe, SAG, and Academy Award.

In 2014's The Giver, a motion picture adaptation of the young adult novel, Meryl Streep played a community leader.

Meryl Streep was aware of the book before being offered the role by co-star and producer Jeff Bridges.

Meryl Streep had a small role in the period drama film The Homesman.

In July 2014, it was announced that Meryl Streep would portray Maria Callas in Master Class, but the project was pulled after director Mike Nichols's death in November of the same year.

In 2015, Meryl Streep starred in Jonathan Demme's Ricki and the Flash, playing a grocery store checkout worker by day who is a rock musician at night, and who has one last chance to reconnect with her estranged family.

Meryl Streep learned to play the guitar for the semi-autobiographical drama-comedy film, which again featured Meryl Streep with her eldest daughter Mamie Gummer.

Meryl Streep won the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress in a Comedy, and received Academy Award, Golden Globe, SAG, and BAFTA nominations.

Meryl Streep next starred as the first American female newspaper publisher, Katharine Graham, to Tom Hanks' Ben Bradlee, in Steven Spielberg's political drama The Post, which centers on The Washington Posts publication of the 1971 Pentagon Papers.

Manohla Dargis wrote that "Meryl Streep creates an acutely moving portrait of a woman who in liberating herself helps instigate a revolution".

Meryl Streep received her 31st Golden Globe nomination and 21st Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

Meryl Streep played a supporting part in Rob Marshall's Mary Poppins Returns, a musical sequel to the 1964 film Mary Poppins starring Emily Blunt in the titular role.

Meryl Streep next featured in her first main role in a television series by starring in the second season of the HBO drama series Big Little Lies in 2019.

Meryl Streep took on the part of Mary Louise Wright, the mother-in-law of Nicole Kidman's character.

Meryl Streep subsequently agreed to the part without reading a script for the first time in her career.

Meryl Streep had leading roles in two films, both released by streaming services.

Meryl Streep reunited with Nicole Kidman for Netflix, in Ryan Murphy's The Prom, a film adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name; and with director Steven Soderbergh for his HBO Max comedy film Let Them All Talk.

Meryl Streep starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up, directed by Adam McKay for Netflix.

Meryl Streep is the spokesperson for the National Women's History Museum, to which she has made significant donations, and hosted numerous events.

On October 4,2012, Meryl Streep donated $1 million to The Public Theater in honor of both its late founder, Joseph Papp, and her friend, the author Nora Ephron.

In 2015, Meryl Streep signed an open letter for which One Campaign had been collecting signatures; the letter was addressed to Angela Merkel and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, urging them to focus on women as they served as heads of the G7 in Germany and the AU in South Africa, respectively, in setting development funding priorities.

Also in 2015, Meryl Streep sent each member of the US Congress a letter supporting the Equal Rights Amendment.

In 2004, Meryl Streep was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award by the board of directors of the American Film Institute.

Those to honor Meryl Streep included, Kevin Kline, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, and Anne Hathaway.

Meryl Streep has captured our imaginations with her unparalleled ability to portray a wide range of roles and attract an audience that has only grown over time, portraying characters who embody the full range of the human experience.

Davis stated to Meryl Streep "You make me proud to be an artist".

Vanity Fair commented that "it's hard to imagine that there was a time before Meryl Streep was the greatest-living actress".

Meryl Streep has stated that she has no particular method when it comes to acting, learning from the days of her early studies that she cannot articulate her practice.

Meryl Streep has stated that many consider her to be a technical actor, but she professed that it comes down to her love of reading the initial script, adding, "I come ready and I don't want to screw around and waste the first 10 takes on adjusting lighting and everybody else getting comfortable".

Longworth believes that in nearly every film, Meryl Streep has "sly infused" a feminist point of view in her portrayals.

Meryl Streep has stated that she grew up listening to artists such as Barbra Streisand, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and she learned a lot about how to use her voice, her "instrument", by listening to Barbra Streisand's albums.

Meryl Streep's performance received the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, as well as Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.

Meryl Streep has commented that using accents as part of her acting is a technique she views as an obvious requirement in her portrayal of a character.

Politically, Meryl Streep has described herself as part of the American Left.

Meryl Streep 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, during which she delivered a predominantly political speech that implicitly criticized President-elect Donald Trump.

Meryl Streep argued that Trump had a very strong platform and used 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".

Author Karina Longworth notes that despite her stardom, for decades Meryl Streep has managed to maintain a relatively normal personal life.

Meryl Streep lived with actor John Cazale in the 1970s, caring for him after his lung cancer diagnosis until he died in March 1978.

Meryl Streep married sculptor Don Gummer six months after Cazale's death.

Meryl Streep is the godmother of Billie Lourd, daughter of fellow actress and close friend Carrie Fisher.

Meryl Streep has been recognised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the following performances:.

Also the recipient of six Grammy Award nominations, five Primetime Emmy Award nominations, and one Tony Award nomination; Meryl Streep is one of few performers to be nominated for the Triple Crown of Acting and EGOT.