Mary Louise “Meryl” Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress. Known for her versatility and adept accent work, she has been described as “the best actress of her generation.” She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over five decades, including three Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, eight Golden Globe Awards, four Emmy Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, in addition to nominations for seven Grammy Awards and a Tony Award.
In the 1970s, Meryl Streep established herself as a versatile and talented actress, transitioning from theater to film and earning critical acclaim. She began with diverse roles, showcasing her ability to inhabit different characters, and by the end of the decade, she had earned her first Academy Award nomination for The Deer Hunter and won for Kramer vs. Kramer. This decade marked the beginning of a legendary career for Streep.
One of Streep’s first professional jobs in 1975 was at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, during which she acted in five plays over six weeks. She 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. She went on to appear in five more roles in her first year in New York. She starred in the musical Happy End on Broadway, and won an Obie for her performance in the off-Broadway play Alice at the Palace.
Although Streep had not aspired to become a film actor, Robert De Niro’s performance in Taxi Driver (1976) had a profound impact on her; she said to herself, “That’s the kind of actor I want to be when I grow up.” Her first feature film role came opposite Jane Fonda in the 1977 film Julia, in which she had a small role during a flashback sequence. Most of her scenes were edited out, but the brief time on screen horrified the actress, “I had a bad wig and they took the words from the scene I shot with Jane and put them in my mouth in a different scene. I thought, I’ve made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business. However, Streep stated in 2015 that Fonda had a lasting influence on her as an actress, and credited her with opening “probably more doors than I probably even know about.”
Robert De Niro, who had spotted Streep in her stage production of The Cherry Orchard, suggested that she play the role of his girlfriend in the war film The Deer Hunter (1978). Author Karina Longworth notes that 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.” Pauline Kael, who later became a strong critic of Streep, remarked that she was a “real beauty” who brought much freshness to the film with her performance. The film’s success exposed Streep to a wider audience and earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, Streep played the leading role of a German woman married to a Jewish artist played by James Woods in Nazi era Germany. She found the material to be “unrelentingly noble” and professed to have taken on the role for financial gain. With an estimated audience of 109 million, Holocaust brought a wider degree of public recognition to Streep, who found herself “on the verge of national visibility.” She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance.
In 1978, she played a supporting role as the former girlfriend turned lesbian in Manhattan (1979) for Woody Allen. 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. Vincent Canby of The New York Times described her performance as being “beautifully played.”
In the drama Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep was cast opposite Dustin Hoffman as an unhappily married woman who abandons her husband and child. 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. The makers agreed with her, and the script was revised. In preparing for the part, 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 Streep to write her own dialogue in two key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman, who “hated her guts” at first. Hoffman and producer Stanley R. Jaffe later spoke of Streep’s tirelessness, with Hoffman commenting: “She’s extraordinarily hard-working, to the extent that she’s obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else, but what she’s doing.” The film was controversial among feminists, but it was a role which film critic Stephen Farber believed displayed Streep’s “own emotional intensity,” writing that she was one of the “rare performers who can imbue the most routine moments with a hint of mystery.”
For the film, 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. She received awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review and National Society of Film Critics for her collective work in her three film releases of 1979. Both The Deer Hunter and Kramer vs. Kramer were major commercial successes and were consecutive winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture.
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