Who Is Meryl Streep?

1. A New Jersey childhood and the voice that started it

Meryl Streep was born Mary Louise Streep on 22 June 1949 in Summit, New Jersey, and grew up in the nearby town of Bernardsville. Her father, Harry Streep, was a pharmaceutical executive, and her mother, Mary Wolf Wilkinson, was a commercial artist. She was the eldest of three children, and by her own account she was a talkative, performing child, who sang in the school choir and acted in school plays. At twelve she began taking singing lessons, and her teacher told her she had a remarkable voice — advice that, in a different life, might have led her to opera. She chose acting instead, but the training in breath, pitch and vocal control stayed with her, and it is one of the foundations of her later mastery of accents.

She attended Vassar College, where she studied drama and costume design, and then the Yale School of Drama, where she trained alongside Sigourney Weaver and others who would become prominent in the theatre. Yale in the early 1970s was a demanding place, and Streep has said that the training was both rigorous and, at times, discouraging: she was told she was not conventionally pretty enough for leading roles, and she worked hard to prove that her talent did not depend on her looks. The experience left her with a lifelong scepticism about the film industry's obsession with appearance, and with a determination to be judged on her work.

Before film, there was the stage. Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971 and spent the first years of her career in the theatre in New York, appearing in Shakespeare and in new plays. She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1976 for the Tennessee Williams play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and she won an Obie Award for her stage work. The stage taught her the disciplines that still define her film acting: the need to build a character from the inside, the importance of voice and physicality, and the habit of treating a role as a job of work rather than an occasion for display.

2. The breakthrough: The Deer Hunter and Kramer vs. Kramer

Streep's film career began in 1977 with Julia, in which she had a small role opposite Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. Her breakthrough came a year later with The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino's film about the Vietnam War, in which she played Linda, the girlfriend of a steelworker who goes to war. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Streep was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, her first Oscar nomination. The same year she won an Emmy Award for her performance in the television miniseries Holocaust, in which she played a German woman married to a Jewish artist. The two roles, taken together, announced a new kind of film actor: one who could move between film and television, between American and European stories, without any loss of authority.

In 1979 she won her first Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress, for Kramer vs. Kramer, in which she played Joanna Kramer, a mother who leaves her husband and child and then returns to fight for custody. The film was a huge commercial and critical success, and Streep's performance was widely praised for its refusal to make Joanna a villain: she played a woman who was selfish and loving at the same time, and the film's moral ambiguity depended on her. The role also established a pattern that would repeat throughout her career: she took parts that other actresses might have refused, because they were difficult, unsympathetic or unglamorous, and she made them into the most interesting characters in the film.

The early 1980s brought the role that many consider her greatest. In Sophie's Choice (1982), she played a Polish woman who survived Auschwitz and who must live with an impossible choice she was forced to make there. To prepare, she learned Polish and German, studied the history of the camps, and worked on the accent until it was, by the account of Polish speakers, essentially flawless. The performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and it remains a reference point for what film acting can achieve: a character so completely realised that the audience forgets it is watching a performance at all.

3. The 1980s and 1990s: range as a career strategy

The two decades that followed Sophie's Choice were an extraordinary display of range. In Silkwood (1983) she played Karen Silkwood, a whistle-blower at a nuclear plant. In Out of Africa (1985) she played Karen Blixen, the Danish writer who ran a farm in Kenya, speaking in a Danish-inflected accent that became famous in its own right. In A Cry in the Dark (1988) she played Lindy Chamberlain, the Australian mother whose baby disappeared at Uluru and who was wrongly convicted of murder, and she mastered an Australian accent so completely that Australian audiences were startled. In The Bridges of Madison County (1995) she played an Italian war bride in Iowa. Each role required a new accent, a new body, a new way of speaking, and each time she made the transformation look effortless.

That effortlessness is the product of preparation. Streep is known for researching her roles intensively: she learns the language, the accent, the physical habits and the history of the person she is playing, and she does it before filming begins, so that by the time the camera runs she is not acting the character but being her. Co-stars have described watching her transform between takes, dropping the accent when the scene ends and picking it up again when it begins. The technique is sometimes described as a form of method acting, but Streep has always resisted labels: she has said that she uses whatever works, and that the work is the point, not the theory.

The range was also a commercial strategy, and a deliberate one. By refusing to be typecast — by playing mothers and murderers, heroines and villains, singers and prime ministers — she kept herself employable in an industry that discards actresses as they age. While many of her contemporaries found the roles drying up in their forties, Streep's career expanded. The 1990s brought films such as The Bridges of Madison County and Marvin's Room, and the 2000s brought a second wave of leading roles that would have been unimaginable for an actress of her age a generation earlier.

4. The second act: The Devil Wears Prada and beyond

In 2006, at the age of fifty-seven, Streep played Miranda Priestly, the terrifying editor of a fashion magazine, in The Devil Wears Prada. The performance was a cultural event: the white hair, the icy delivery, the withering glance became instantly famous, and the film was a major commercial success. It also showed that Streep could dominate a popular comedy as completely as she had dominated a Holocaust drama, and it introduced her to a new generation of younger viewers. The role earned her another Oscar nomination, her fourteenth, and it confirmed that her career had no natural endpoint.

The years that followed were among the most productive of her life. She played the singer Donna in the musical Mamma Mia! (2008), which became one of the highest-grossing films of the year. She played the chef Julia Child in Julie & Julia (2009), earning another nomination. She played Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011), transforming herself physically and vocally into the British prime minister, and won her third Academy Award — her first in nearly thirty years, and a reminder that her talent had not diminished. She played a witch in Into the Woods (2014), a newspaper publisher in The Post (2017), and she joined the cast of the television series Big Little Lies, showing that the move between film and television, which she had made at the start of her career, was still natural to her.

Her later work has also included an explicit engagement with the politics of her industry. In 2017, at the Golden Globe Awards, she used her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award to criticise the incoming president, Donald Trump, and to defend the press and the arts. The speech was widely discussed, and it divided opinion in the familiar way: her supporters praised her courage, her critics said that actors should not lecture their audiences. Streep has never been shy about her views, and she has spoken about pay inequality in Hollywood, about the treatment of women in the industry, and about the importance of public funding for the arts.

5. The craft: accents, preparation and disappearing

What makes Meryl Streep's acting distinctive is not a single technique but a combination of skills that few actors possess together. The first is her ear. She is famous for accents, and the list is long: Polish, Danish, Australian, Italian, British, German, and the many varieties of American speech, from the flat vowels of the Midwest to the clipped tones of New York. She has said that she learns an accent by listening to recordings and by working with a dialect coach, and that the accent is not decoration but a way into the character: the way a person speaks is the way they think, and getting the voice right is the first step to getting the person right.

The second is her preparation. She reads, she researches, she meets the people her characters are based on where they are real, and she studies the historical period. For The Iron Lady she watched hours of footage of Margaret Thatcher and worked with a voice coach until she could reproduce Thatcher's particular cadence. For Sophie's Choice she learned Polish. For Julie & Julia she studied Julia Child's voice and mannerisms until they were, in the judgement of those who knew Child, uncannily accurate. The preparation is invisible in the finished performance, which is the point: the audience sees the character, not the work.

The third is her willingness to disappear. Many stars play versions of themselves; Streep plays people who are nothing like her, and she does it without vanity. She has played women who are cruel, selfish, foolish and unattractive, and she has played them without asking the audience to like them. That willingness is rare, and it is the reason directors seek her out for the hardest roles. It is also the reason her performances last: a character who is fully realised does not date, and the films she made in the 1980s are watched today with the same freshness they had when they were new.

6. Awards, records and the question of greatness

The award record is unmatched. Twenty-one Academy Award nominations is a record for any actor, male or female, and it is a record that is unlikely to be broken soon: the nearest rival, Katharine Hepburn, had twelve nominations and four wins, and Jack Nicholson, the most nominated man, had twelve. Streep has also won eight Golden Globe Awards, more than any other performer, and she has been nominated for the Tony Award, the Emmy Award and the Grammy Award, making her one of the few performers to have been recognised across all four major award systems.

The numbers invite a question: is she the greatest film actor of all time? The case in her favour rests on the range, the consistency and the longevity. No other actor has sustained excellence across so many kinds of film for so long, and no other actor has been so consistently the best thing in the films she appears in. The case against the claim, such as it is, rests on taste: some critics argue that her technical brilliance can feel studied, and that her performances sometimes show the work more than they should. It is a legitimate criticism, and it is one that has been made by serious critics. But it is a criticism of a particular style, not of the achievement, and even her critics concede that the style is hers alone.

What is not in dispute is her influence. A generation of actors — women in particular — cite her as the reason they believed a serious acting career was possible, and as the model for how to sustain one. She showed that an actress could age in public and keep working, that she could play unlikable women and still be loved by audiences, and that craft mattered more than celebrity. In an industry that rewards the opposite of all those things, that is a considerable legacy.

7. Why she matters: the actor as craftsperson

Meryl Streep matters because she restored a certain idea of acting to the centre of film. In an age of franchises, computer effects and celebrity, she has insisted, film after film, that the most interesting thing on screen is a human being, fully imagined, speaking and moving as that person would. Her career is a demonstration that acting is a craft, like carpentry or surgery, that can be learned, practised and perfected, and that its highest form is invisible: the audience forgets the actor and remembers the person.

She also matters as a model of a career. She has worked steadily for more than fifty years, across stage, film and television, without a period of eclipse, and she has done it by choosing difficult roles and by preparing for them with a seriousness that younger actors are taught to imitate. She has survived the film industry's treatment of older women, not by fighting it directly but by making herself indispensable: there is no one else who can do what she does, and the industry knows it.

The biography on this site gives the verified facts of her life. The judgement of her work is best made by watching the films, and by noticing the same thing that audiences have noticed for five decades: that when Meryl Streep is on screen, the film becomes about the person she is playing, and everything else recedes. That is a rare gift, and it is why, when the history of film acting is written, her name will be at or near the top of the list.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Meryl Streep
• Wikipedia — Meryl Streep
• Golden Globes — Meryl Streep
• Wikipedia — Meryl Streep on screen and stage

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• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.