Meryl Streep Biography

Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film. She is widely regarded as one of the most talented and respected actresses of the contemporary era.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with Julia. Both critical and commercial success came quickly with roles in The Deer Hunter (1978) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), the former giving Streep her first Oscar nomination and the latter her first win. Meryl Streep  later won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Sophie's Choice (1982).Streep has received 16 Academy Award nominations, winning two, and 25 Golden Globe nominations, winning seven, more nominations than any other actor in the history of either award. Meryl Streep work has also earned her two Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Cannes Film Festival award, five New York Film Critics Circle Awards, five Grammy Award nominations, a BAFTA award, an Australian Film Institute Award and a Tony Award nomination, amongst others. Meryl Streep was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004.

Streep was born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey, the daughter of Mary Wolf (née Wilkinson), a commercial artist and former art editor, and Harry William Streep, Jr., a pharmaceutical executive.Meryl Streep has two brothers, Dana and Harry. 

Meryl Streep paternal ancestry originates in Loffenau, Germany, from where her second great-grandfather, Gottfried Streeb, emigrated to the United States, and where one of her ancestors served as mayor. Another line of her father's family was from Giswil, a small town in Switzerland. Meryl Streep maternal ancestry originates in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Meryl Streep eighth great-grandfather, Lawrence Wilkinson, was one of the first Europeans to settle Rhode Island. Streep is also a distant relative of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and records show her family were among the first purchasers of land in Pennsylvania.Meryl Streep was raised a Presbyterian, and grew up in Bernardsville, New Jersey, where she attended Bernards High School.Meryl Streephad many school friends who were Catholic, and regularly attended Mass because she loved its rituals.Meryl Streep received her B.A., in Drama at Vassar College in 1971 (where she briefly received instruction from actress Jean Arthur), but also enrolled as an exchange student at Dartmouth College for a quarter before it became coeducational. Meryl Streep subsequently earned an M.F.A. from Yale School of Drama. While at Yale, she played a variety of roles onstage,from the glamorous Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an eighty-year old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.

Career

Streep performed in several theater productions in New York and New Jersey after graduating from Yale School of Drama,including the New York Shakespeare Festival productions of Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew with Raúl Juliá, and Measure for Measure opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale, who became her fiancé. Meryl Streep starred on Broadway in the Brecht/Weill musical Happy End, and won an Obie for her performance in the all-sung off-Broadway production of Alice at the Palace.

Meryl Streep by Jack MitchellStreep began auditioning for film roles, and later recalled an unsuccessful audition for Dino De Laurentiis for the leading role in King Kong. De Laurentiis commented to his son in Italian, "Meryl Streep's ugly. Why did you bring me this thing?" and was shocked when Streep replied in fluent Italian. Streep's first feature film was Julia (1977), in which she played a small but pivotal role during a flashback scene. Streep was living in New York City with her fiancé, Cazale, who had been diagnosed with bone cancer.He was cast in The Deer Hunter (1978), and Streep was delighted to secure a small role because it allowed her to remain with Cazale for the duration of filming. Meryl Streep was not specifically interested in the part, commenting, "They needed a girl between the two guys and I was it."Meryl Streep played a leading role in the television miniseries Holocaust (1978) as a German woman married to a Jewish artist in Nazi era Germany. Meryl Streep later explained that she had considered the material to be "unrelentingly noble", and had taken the role only because she had needed money.Streep travelled to Germany and Austria for filming while Cazale remained in New York. Upon her return, Streep found that Cazale's illness had progressed, and she nursed him until his death on March 12, 1978. Meryl Streep spoke of her grief and her hope that work would provide a diversion; she accepted a role in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) with Alan Alda, later commenting that she played it on "automatic pilot", and performed the role of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park. With an estimated audience of 109 million, Holocaust brought a degree of public recognition to Streep, who was described in August 1978 as "on the verge of national visibility".Meryl Streep won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie for her performance.

The Deer Hunter (1978) was released a month later, and Streep was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.Streep played a supporting role in Manhattan (1979) for Woody Allen, later stating that she had not seen a complete script and was given only the six pages of her own scenes, and that she had not been permitted to improvise a word of her dialogue. Asked to comment on the script for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in a meeting with the producer Stan Jaffee, director Robert Benton and star Dustin Hoffman, Streep insisted that the female character was not representative of many real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles, and was written as "too evil". Jaffee, Benton and Hoffman agreed with Streep, and the script was revised.In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a mother and housewife with a career,and frequented the Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set. Benton allowed Streep to write her dialogue in two of her key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman.Jaffee and Hoffman later spoke of Streep's tirelessness, with Hoffman commenting, "Meryl Streep's extraordinarily hardworking, to the extent that she's obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else but what she's doing."

Streep drew critical acclaim for her performance in each of her three films released in 1979: the romantic comedy Manhattan, the political drama The Seduction of Joe Tynan and the family drama, Kramer vs. Kramer.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 the three films. Among the awards won for Kramer vs. Kramer were the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Streep at the Academy Awards, 1989.After prominent supporting roles in two of the 1970s' most successful films, the consecutive winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Deer Hunter and Kramer vs. Kramer, and praise for her versatility in several supporting roles, Streep progressed to leading roles. Meryl Streep first was The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981). A story within a story drama, the film paired Streep with Jeremy Irons as contemporary actors, telling their modern story as well as the Victorian era drama they were performing. A New York Magazine article commented that while many female stars of the past had cultivated a singular identity in their films, Streep was a "chameleon", willing to play any type of role.Streep was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work.Meryl Streep next film, the psychological thriller, Still of the Night (1982) reunited her with Robert Benton, the director of Kramer vs. Kramer, and co-starred Roy Scheider and Jessica Tandy. Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, noted that the film was an homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, but that one of its main weaknesses was a lack of chemistry between Streep and Scheider, concluding that Streep "is stunning, but she's not on screen anywhere near long enough".

As the Polish holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice (1982), Streep's emotional dramatic performance and her apparent mastery of a Polish accent drew praise. William Styron wrote the novel with Ursula Andress in mind for the part of Sophie, but Streep was very determined to get the role. After she obtained a pirated copy of the script, she went to Alan J. Pakula and threw herself on the ground begging him to give her the part. Streep filmed the "choice" scene in one take and refused to do it again, as she found shooting the scene extremely painful and emotionally exhausting.Among several notable acting awards, Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. Roger Ebert said of her performance, "Streep plays the Brooklyn scenes with an enchanting Polish-American accent (she has the first accent I've ever wanted to hug), and she plays the flashbacks in subtitled German and Polish. There is hardly an emotion that Streep doesn't touch in this movie, and yet we're never aware of her straining. This is one of the most astonishing and yet one of the most unaffected and natural performances I can imagine."

Meryl Streep followed this success with a biographical film, Silkwood (1983), in which she played her first real-life character, the union activist Karen Silkwood. Meryl Streep discussed her preparation for the role in an interview with Roger Ebert and said that she had met with people close to Silkwood to learn more about her, and in doing so realized that each person saw a different aspect of Silkwood.Streep concentrated on the events of Silkwood's life and concluded, "I didn't try to turn myself into Karen. I just tried to look at what she did. I put together every piece of information I could find about her... What I finally did was look at the events in her life, and try to understand her from the inside."Meryl Streep  next films were a romantic drama, Falling in Love (1984) opposite Robert De Niro, and a British drama, Plenty (1985). Roger Ebert said of Streep's performance in Plenty that she conveyed "great subtlety; it is hard to play an unbalanced, neurotic, self-destructive woman, and do it with such gentleness and charm... Streep creates a whole character around a woman who could have simply been a catalogue of symptoms."

Out of Africa (1985) starred Streep as the Danish writer Karen Blixen and co-starred Robert Redford. A significant critical success, the film received a 63% "fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes. Streep co-starred with Jack Nicholson in her next two films, the dramas Heartburn (1986) and Ironweed (1987), in which she sang onscreen for the first time since the television movie, Secret Service, in 1977. In A Cry in the Dark (1988), she played the biographical role of Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman who had been convicted of the murder of her infant daughter in which Chamberlain claimed her baby had been taken by a dingo. Filmed in Australia, Streep won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, a Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and was nominated for several other awards for her portrayal of Chamberlain.

In Meryl Streep -Devil (1989), Streep played her first comedic film role, opposite Roseanne Barr. Richard Corliss, writing for Time, commented that Streep was the "one reason" to see the film and observed that it marked a departure from the type of role for which she had been known, saying, "Surprise! Inside the Greer Garson roles Streep usually plays, a vixenish Carole Lombard is screaming to be cut loose."From 1984 to 1990, Streep won six People's Choice Awards for Favorite Motion Picture Actress and, in 1990, was named World Favorite.In the 1990s, Streep continued to choose a great variety of roles, including a drug-addicted movie actress in a screen adaptation of Carrie Fisher's novel Postcards from the Edge, with Dennis Quaid and Shirley MacLaine. Streep and Goldie Hawn had established a friendship and were interested in making a film together. After considering various projects, they decided upon Thelma and Louise, until Streep's pregnancy coincided with the filming schedule, and the producers decided to proceed with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis.They subsequently filmed the farcical black comedy, Death Becomes Meryl Streep, with Bruce Willis as their co-star. Time's Richard Corliss wrote approvingly of Streep's "wicked-witch routine" but dismissed the film as "Meryl Streep -Devil with a make-over".

Biographer Karen Hollinger describes this period as a downturn in the popularity of Streep's films, which reached its nadir with the failure of Death Becomes Meryl Streep, 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.[clarification needed] Streep commented that she had limited her options by her preference to work in Los Angeles, close to her family,a situation that she had anticipated in a 1981 interview when she commented, "By the time an actress hits her mid-forties, no one's interested in her anymore. And if you want to fit a couple of babies into that schedule as well, you've got to pick your parts with great care."Streep appeared with Glenn Close in the movie version of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits; the screen adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County with Clint Eastwood; The River Wild; Marvin's Room (with Diane Keaton and Leonardo DiCaprio); One True Thing; and Music of the Heart, in a role that required her to learn to play the violin, Meryl Streep was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for "The Bridges of Madison County", "Music of the Heart" (where she plays the role of Roberta Guaspari) and "One True Thing".

Main article: Meryl Streep in the 2000s

Streep entered the 2000s with Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a science fiction film about a child-like android, played by Haley Joel Osment, uniquely programmed with the ability to love, voicing the Blue Fairy.The same year, Streep co-hosted the annual Nobel Peace Prize concert with Liam Neeson in Oslo, Norway, and began work on Spike Jonze's comedy-drama Adaptation (2002), in which she portrayed real-life journalist Susan Orlean. Lauded by critics and viewers alike,the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, and won Streep her fourth Golden Globe in the Best Supporting Actress category.Also in 2002, Streep appeared alongside Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, based on the 1999 novel of the same title by Michael Cunningham. Focusing on three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, the film was generally well-received and won all three leading actresses a Silver Bear for Best Actress the following year.

Streep in 2004The following year, Streep had a cameo as herself in the Farrelly brothers comedy Stuck on You (2003) and reunited with Mike Nichols to star with Al Pacino and Emma Thompson in the HBO 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. Streep, who was cast in four different roles in the mini-series, received her second Emmy Award and fifth Golden Globe for her performance.In 2004, Streep was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award by the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute,and appeared in Jonathan Demme's moderately successful remake The Manchurian Candidate,co-starring Denzel Washington, playing a U.S. senator and a manipulative, ruthless mother of a vice-presidential candidate. The same year, she played the supporting role of Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events alongside Jim Carrey, based on the first three novels in Snicket's book series. The black comedy received generally favorable reviews from critics,and won the Academy Award for Best Makeup.

Streep's was next cast in the 2005 comedy Prime, directed by Ben Younger. In the film, she played Lisa Metzger, the Jewish psychoanalyst of a divorced and lonesome business-woman, played by Uma Thurman, who enters a relationship with Metzger's 23-year-old son (Bryan Greenberg). A modest mainstream success, it eventually grossed US$67.9 million internationally. In 2006, Streep, along with Lily Tomlin, portrayed the last two members of what was once a popular family country music act in Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion. A comedic ensemble piece featuring Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline and Woody Harrelson, the film revolves around the behind-the-scenes activities at the long-running public radio show of the same name. The film grossed over US$26 million, the majority of which came from domestic markets. Commercially, Streep fared better with a role in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), a loose screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel of the same name. Portraying the powerful and demanding fashion magazine editor and boss of a recent college graduate (played by Anne Hathaway) Miranda Priestly, Streep's performance drew rave reviews from critics and later earned her many award nominations, including her record-setting 14th Oscar bid, as well as another Golden Globe. Upon its commercial release, the film became Streep's biggest commercial success yet, grossing more than US$326.5 million worldwide.

In 2007, Streep was cast in four different films. Meryl Streep portrayed a wealthy university patron in Chen Shi-zheng's much-delayed feature drama Dark Matter (2007), a film about of a Chinese science graduate student who becomes violent after dealing with academic politics at a U.S. university. Inspired by the events of a 1991 tragedy at the University of Iowa. and initially scheduled for a 2007 release, producers and investors decided to shelve Dark Matter out of respect for the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007.The drama received negative to mixed reviews upon its limited 2008 released. Streep played a U.S. government official, who investigates an Egyptian foreign national in Washington, D.C., suspected of terrorism in the Middle East, in the political thriller Rendition (2007), directed by Gavin Hood.Keen to get involved into a thriller film, Streep welcomed the opportunity to star in a film genre for which she usually was not offered scripts and immediately signed on to the project. Upon its release, Rendition became a failure, and received mixed reviews.

Also in 2007, Streep had a short role alongside Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close and her eldest daughter Mamie Gummer in Lajos Koltai's drama film Evening, based on the 1998 novel of the same name by Susan Minot. Switching between the present and the past, it tells the story of a bedridden woman, who remembers her tumultuous life the mid-1950s. The film was released to lukewarm reactions by critics, who called it "beautifully filmed, but decidedly dull [and] a colossal waste of a talented cast." Streep's last film of 2007 was Robert Redfords Lions for Lambs, a film about the connection between a platoon of United States soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. senator, a reporter, and a California college professor.

Streep with her fellow cast and all four members of ABBA at the Swedish premiere of Mamma Mia! in July 2008.In 2008, Streep found major commercial success when she starred in Phyllida Lloyd's Mamma Mia!, a film adaptation of the musical of the same name, based on the songs of Swedish pop group ABBA. Co-starring Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth, Streep played a single mother and a former backing singer, whose daughter (Seyfried), a bride-to-be who never met her father, invites three likely paternal candidates to her wedding on an idyllic Greek island. An instant box office success, Mamma Mia! became Streep's highest-grossing film to date, with box office receipts of US$602.6 million, also ranking it first among the highest-grossing musical films of all-time. Nominated for another Golden Globe, Streep's performance was generally well-received by critics, with Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe commenting "the greatest actor in American movies has finally become a movie star." Streep's other film of 2008 was Doubt featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis. A drama revolving around the stern principal nun (Streep) of a Bronx Catholic school in 1964 who brings charges of pedophilia against a popular priest (Hoffman), the film became a moderate box office success, but was hailed by many critics as one of the best of 2008.The film received five Academy Awards nominations, for its four lead actors and for Shanley's script.

In 2009, Streep played chef Julia Child in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, co-starring Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci. The first major motion picture based on a blog, it contrasts the life of Child in the early years of her culinary career with the life of young New Yorker Julie Powell (Adams), who aspires to cook all 524 recipes in Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days, a challenge she described on her popular blog, The Julie/Julia Project, that would make her a published author. The same year, Streep also starred in Nancy Meyers' romantic comedy It's Complicated, with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Meryl Streep also received nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for this film.Streep also lent her voice to Mrs. Felicity Fox in the stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox.

In July 2010, it was announced that Streep will star in an upcoming comedy entitled Mommy & Me alongside Tina Fey who will play her daughter. The film is being directed by Stanley Tucci. Streep has also been cast as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, a look at the Prime Minister during the Falklands War and her years in retirement. domestic accents, from Danish in Out of Africa (also 1985), to English in Plenty (1985), as well as Italian in The Bridges of Madison County (1995), to a Midwestern dialect in A Prairie Home Companion (2006). In A Cry in the Dark (1988) she coloured Australian English with New Zealand tonalities, as most critics were impressed with Streep's performance and ability to master an Australian accent. For her role in the film Sophie's Choice (1982), she took a language course in Polish for four months, so as to interpret a young Pole perfectly. Despite the accolades accorded to her, Streep has responded to praise with the assertion that adopting accents is an element she simply considers an obvious part of her task in creating characters. When asked whether accents help her get into character, she responded, "I'm always baffled by this question... How could I play that part and talk like me?" When questioned as to how she reproduces different accents, Streep replied, "I listen."

Theater

In New York City, she appeared in the 1976 Broadway double bill of Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays. For the former, she received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. Meryl Streep other early Broadway credits include Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical Happy End in which she originally appeared off-Broadway at the Chelsea Theater Center. Meryl Streep received Drama Desk Award nominations for both productions. Once Streep's film career flourished, she took a long break from stage acting.

In July 2001, 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. The staging, directed by Mike Nichols, also featured Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Marcia Gay Harden, and John Goodman.

In August and September 2006, she starred onstage at The Public Theater's production of Mother Courage and Meryl Streep Children at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.The Public Theater production was a new translation by playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), with songs in the Weill/Brecht style written by composer Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change); veteran director George C. Wolfe was at the helm. Streep starred alongside Kevin Kline and Austin Pendleton in this three-and-a-half-hour play in which she sang and appeared in almost every scene.

Music

After appearing in Mamma Mia!, Streep's rendition of the song "Mamma Mia" rose to popularity in the Portuguese music charts, where it peaked at #8 in October 2008.

At the 35th People's Choice Awards, her version of Mamma Mia won an award for "Favorite Song From A Soundtrack".In 2008, Streep was nominated for a Grammy Award (her fifth nomination) for her work on the Mamma Mia! soundtrack. Philanthropy Streep is the Spokesperson for the National Woman's History Museum, to which she has donated significant amounts of money and hosted numerous events. Personal life  Meryl Streep was engaged to actor John Cazale until his death in March 1978. Streep married sculptor Don Gummer on September 15, 1978 They have four children: Henry "Hank" Wolfe Gummer (born November 13, 1979), Mary Willa "Mamie" Gummer (born August 3, 1983), Grace Jane Gummer (born May 9, 1986), and Louisa Jacobson Gummer (born June 12, 1991). Both Mamie and Grace are actresses.Hank is a musician who performs under the name Henry Wolfe.When asked if religion plays a part in her life in an interview in 2009, Streep replied, "I follow no doctrine. I don't belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram." Streep does not rule out the possibility that God exists. “I do have a sense of trying to make things better. Where does that come from?”AwardsStreep receiving her honorary degree from Harvard University on May 27, 2010 Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Meryl StreepStreep holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations of any actor, having been nominated sixteen times since her first nomination in 1979 for The Deer Hunter (thirteen for Best Actress and three for Best Supporting Actress). Streep is also the most-nominated performer for a Golden Globe Award (with 25 nominations) and, with her overall seventh win for Julie & Julia in 2010, has won the most Golden Globes (excluding special awards).In 1998, Women in Film awarded Streep with the Crystal Award for outstanding women who have helped expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.In 2003, Streep was awarded an honorary César Award by the French Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma. In 2004, at the Moscow International Film Festival, Streep was honored with the Stanislavsky Award for the outstanding achievement in the career of acting and devotion to the principles of Stanislavsky's school. Also in 2004, Streep received the AFI Life Achievement Award. In 2009, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by Princeton University. In 2010, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree by Harvard University.

Streep received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1998, and May 27, 2004. was proclaimed "Meryl Streep Day" by Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields.

In 2008, Streep was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.