The Groundbreaking Career of Meryl Streep
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VOICE OVER: Elise Doucet
WRITTEN BY: Savannah Sher
The groundbreaking career of Meryl Streep is unlike any other.
She’s one of the entertainment industry’s essential figures, and has become known as the most prolific actress of a generation. Welcome to MsMojo, and this is The Groundbreaking Career of Meryl Streep.
Streep was born in 1949 as the first daughter of Mary Wilkinson Streep and Harry William Streep, Jr. Her mother was in the arts, working as an artist and editor, and served as inspiration for Meryl from a young age. Streep credits her mother for giving her the confidence boost she needed to pursue her dreams. She said in a piece for More magazine that her mother was always her primary mentor, adding, “She was a mentor because she said to me, ‘Meryl, you’re capable. You’re so great.” It’s easy for us to see now that Mary Streep was right, but she had the foresight to encourage her daughter to reach for greatness.
Streep’s interest in acting in particular was evident from a very young age. In middle school, she acted in a production of "The Family Upstairs” and was always ready to be on camera when it came to family home movies. Her career could have taken a completely different direction, because when she was 12 she began singing publicly at a school recital which led to four years of opera lessons, though she opted to forgo singing in favor of other pursuits.
In high school, she acted in several productions, and by the time she was attending college at Vassar was beginning to take the craft seriously. In Karina Longworth’s book, “Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor”, she quotes a Vassar drama professor, Clinton J. Atkinson, as saying "I don't think anyone ever taught Meryl acting. She really taught herself." For her masters degree, she decided to study drama at Yale, and threw herself into it, starring in as many as a dozen productions a year. She quickly began experiencing symptoms of burnout and even considered quitting.
She graduated though, and by 1975 she was debuting in New York in “Trelawny of the Wells” alongside Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow. Her career on the stage took off, and she appeared in several more plays in her first year in the city. She soon received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her work in “27 Wagons Full of Cotton” and “A Memory of Two Mondays”. Just a couple of years later in 1978, she impressed viewers on the small screen with her role in the miniseries “Holocaust”, picking up an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie. The very same year, her performance in “The Deer Hunter”, which is largely considered to be her breakthrough film role, got her an Academy Award nomination. In her biography, Longworth said that in this film Streep "made a case for female empowerment by playing a woman to whom empowerment was a foreign concept—a normal lady from an average American small town, for whom subservience was the only thing she knew".
Though she may not have won the statue for “The Deer Hunter”, she only had to wait one year before taking home an Oscar. Because she was on to another high profile release in 1979 with “Kramer vs. Kramer”. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and critics were quick to praise her performance. The film won big that night, taking home awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for Dustin Hoffman.
She did not slow down after that, receiving nods from the Academy almost every year for the next decade. During that time she starred in a string of critically acclaimed films like “Sophie's Choice”, “Silkwood” and “Out of Africa”. These films demonstrated her versatility as an actress, showing that she was able to play a labor union activist just as well as a Danish woman running a Kenyan plantation, or a Polish woman forced to choose between her two children in a concentration camp. Reviewers couldn’t stop raving about her performances, saying, for example, of “Silkwood” that, “Meryl Streep gives the year's most astounding performance by an actress, adding vigor and complexity to almost every scene with her endlessly inventive portrayal of the eccentric heroine." It was in these roles that she displayed her affinity for accents, which over the years have ranged from Italian to Danish to British to a New Yorker from the Bronx.
One of the reasons Streep is so respected is that she has been going strong in the industry for decades, and never seemed to settle into a specific role, taking parts in every genre. In 1996 she starred in the romantic drama “The Bridges of Madison County” with Clint Eastwood. And a decade later, she took on an equally iconic but tonally totally different role in 2006’s “The Devil Wears Prada”, showing that she definitely doesn’t take herself too seriously. Mike Nichols, a director who has worked with Streep many times, said that, "In every role, she becomes a totally new human being. As she becomes the person she is portraying, the other performers begin to react to her as if she were that person."
She was also able to dust off her own singing skills from her youth, in 2008’s musical hit “Mamma Mia!”.
Meryl Streep has proven that there’s a space for actresses in Hollywood over the age of 30, with her career flourishing even today as she enters her 70s. She’s asserted that women have an advantage when it comes to acting, saying, “Women are better at acting than men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing somebody bigger than you of something he doesn't know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia.” The actress is relatively private about her home life, but she has four children, all of whom have followed in their mother’s footsteps to pursue careers in the entertainment industry.
She certainly knows how to adapt, and still today manages to find her way into the hottest properties of the moment, be it Greta Gerwig’s adaption of “Little Women” or the HBO hit show “Big Little Lies”.
At the 2017 Golden Globe Awards, Streep was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement. While this was a major accomplishment on its own, Streep used the time she was given on stage to give an empowering speech to viewers in the audience and at home about the recent election of Donald Trump, which ended up being the most notable moment of the night.
When all of Hollywood was thrown into the maelstrom of the Harvey Weinstein controversy, Streep was accused by Rose McGowan of being complicit. McGowan claimed that Streep must have been aware, but remained silent. Streep responded that she hadn’t known, and that she was sorry to be seen as an adversary, “because we are both, together with all the women in our business, standing in defiance of the same implacable foe: a status quo that wants so badly to return to the bad old days, the old ways where women were used, abused and refused entry into the decision-making, top levels of the industry."
Today, she’s been nominated for a staggering 21 Academy Awards, which is more than any other performer in history. The male actor with the most nominations is Jack Nicholson with 12. Julie Miller wrote in Vanity Fair that "it's hard to imagine that there was a time before Meryl Streep was the greatest-living actress" and we have to say that its difficult to imagine a time where that will no longer be the case.
Streep was born in 1949 as the first daughter of Mary Wilkinson Streep and Harry William Streep, Jr. Her mother was in the arts, working as an artist and editor, and served as inspiration for Meryl from a young age. Streep credits her mother for giving her the confidence boost she needed to pursue her dreams. She said in a piece for More magazine that her mother was always her primary mentor, adding, “She was a mentor because she said to me, ‘Meryl, you’re capable. You’re so great.” It’s easy for us to see now that Mary Streep was right, but she had the foresight to encourage her daughter to reach for greatness.
Streep’s interest in acting in particular was evident from a very young age. In middle school, she acted in a production of "The Family Upstairs” and was always ready to be on camera when it came to family home movies. Her career could have taken a completely different direction, because when she was 12 she began singing publicly at a school recital which led to four years of opera lessons, though she opted to forgo singing in favor of other pursuits.
In high school, she acted in several productions, and by the time she was attending college at Vassar was beginning to take the craft seriously. In Karina Longworth’s book, “Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor”, she quotes a Vassar drama professor, Clinton J. Atkinson, as saying "I don't think anyone ever taught Meryl acting. She really taught herself." For her masters degree, she decided to study drama at Yale, and threw herself into it, starring in as many as a dozen productions a year. She quickly began experiencing symptoms of burnout and even considered quitting.
She graduated though, and by 1975 she was debuting in New York in “Trelawny of the Wells” alongside Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow. Her career on the stage took off, and she appeared in several more plays in her first year in the city. She soon received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her work in “27 Wagons Full of Cotton” and “A Memory of Two Mondays”. Just a couple of years later in 1978, she impressed viewers on the small screen with her role in the miniseries “Holocaust”, picking up an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie. The very same year, her performance in “The Deer Hunter”, which is largely considered to be her breakthrough film role, got her an Academy Award nomination. In her biography, Longworth said that in this film Streep "made a case for female empowerment by playing a woman to whom empowerment was a foreign concept—a normal lady from an average American small town, for whom subservience was the only thing she knew".
Though she may not have won the statue for “The Deer Hunter”, she only had to wait one year before taking home an Oscar. Because she was on to another high profile release in 1979 with “Kramer vs. Kramer”. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and critics were quick to praise her performance. The film won big that night, taking home awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for Dustin Hoffman.
She did not slow down after that, receiving nods from the Academy almost every year for the next decade. During that time she starred in a string of critically acclaimed films like “Sophie's Choice”, “Silkwood” and “Out of Africa”. These films demonstrated her versatility as an actress, showing that she was able to play a labor union activist just as well as a Danish woman running a Kenyan plantation, or a Polish woman forced to choose between her two children in a concentration camp. Reviewers couldn’t stop raving about her performances, saying, for example, of “Silkwood” that, “Meryl Streep gives the year's most astounding performance by an actress, adding vigor and complexity to almost every scene with her endlessly inventive portrayal of the eccentric heroine." It was in these roles that she displayed her affinity for accents, which over the years have ranged from Italian to Danish to British to a New Yorker from the Bronx.
One of the reasons Streep is so respected is that she has been going strong in the industry for decades, and never seemed to settle into a specific role, taking parts in every genre. In 1996 she starred in the romantic drama “The Bridges of Madison County” with Clint Eastwood. And a decade later, she took on an equally iconic but tonally totally different role in 2006’s “The Devil Wears Prada”, showing that she definitely doesn’t take herself too seriously. Mike Nichols, a director who has worked with Streep many times, said that, "In every role, she becomes a totally new human being. As she becomes the person she is portraying, the other performers begin to react to her as if she were that person."
She was also able to dust off her own singing skills from her youth, in 2008’s musical hit “Mamma Mia!”.
Meryl Streep has proven that there’s a space for actresses in Hollywood over the age of 30, with her career flourishing even today as she enters her 70s. She’s asserted that women have an advantage when it comes to acting, saying, “Women are better at acting than men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing somebody bigger than you of something he doesn't know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia.” The actress is relatively private about her home life, but she has four children, all of whom have followed in their mother’s footsteps to pursue careers in the entertainment industry.
She certainly knows how to adapt, and still today manages to find her way into the hottest properties of the moment, be it Greta Gerwig’s adaption of “Little Women” or the HBO hit show “Big Little Lies”.
At the 2017 Golden Globe Awards, Streep was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement. While this was a major accomplishment on its own, Streep used the time she was given on stage to give an empowering speech to viewers in the audience and at home about the recent election of Donald Trump, which ended up being the most notable moment of the night.
When all of Hollywood was thrown into the maelstrom of the Harvey Weinstein controversy, Streep was accused by Rose McGowan of being complicit. McGowan claimed that Streep must have been aware, but remained silent. Streep responded that she hadn’t known, and that she was sorry to be seen as an adversary, “because we are both, together with all the women in our business, standing in defiance of the same implacable foe: a status quo that wants so badly to return to the bad old days, the old ways where women were used, abused and refused entry into the decision-making, top levels of the industry."
Today, she’s been nominated for a staggering 21 Academy Awards, which is more than any other performer in history. The male actor with the most nominations is Jack Nicholson with 12. Julie Miller wrote in Vanity Fair that "it's hard to imagine that there was a time before Meryl Streep was the greatest-living actress" and we have to say that its difficult to imagine a time where that will no longer be the case.
