Meryl Streep (born Mary Louise Streep June 22, 1949) is a two-time Academy Award-winning American actress who has received numerous accolades for her work in movies and television and who, from the 1980s to the present day, has been regarded as one of the best in her field. She is the most Oscar-nominated actor in the history of American motion picture industry, with 13 Academy Award nominations.

Biography

Meryl Streep was born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey, USA. Her father, Harry Streep Jr., was a pharmaceutical executive of Dutch descent; her mother, Mary, was a commercial artist of Irish, Swiss, and English descent. The family's original surname, Messerschnitz, was changed to Streep in the Netherlands by her Sephardic Jewish ancestors, although Streep's Jewish ancestry is distant and her father was raised an Episcopalian.

In September 1978 Meryl married sculptor Don Gummer and they are parents to four children: Henry, Mamie (Mary), Grace, and Louisa. Her son Henry graduated Dartmouth College (also alma mater to Streep, for a year as a transfer student) and he attended NYU's Graduate Acting Program to earn his MFA. He is currently front man for New York indie band BRAVO SILVA. Her daughter Mamie has recently received critical acclaim for her off Broadway debut in Mr. Marmalade. Grace is currently an art and religion major in the class of 2008 at Vassar College. Streep's integrity in keeping her personal life personal is well known within the industry. Streep refers to herself as "an actress who goes home to her family when I'm finished working".

Meryl Streep was raised in the small village of Bernardsville, New Jersey, majoring in drama at Vassar College and earning a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama. She appeared in her first films, Julia and The Deer Hunter, in 1977 and 1978, the latter of which would earn her her first Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actress. Streep has been nominated a total of 13 times—10 for Best Actress and 3 for Best Supporting Actress—making her the most-nominated actor of all time, surpassing Katharine Hepburn. She won Academy Awards for her roles in Kramer vs. Kramer (Best Supporting Actress, 1979), and Sophie's Choice (Best Actress, 1982).

Streep's career continued to climb in the 1980s, appearing in Woody Allen's Manhattan, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Silkwood, Out of Africa, Ironweed, Postcards from the Edge, and playing Lindy Chamberlain in A Cry in the Dark, the movie telling of one of the greatest Australian mysteries ever—the disappearance of Chamberlain's baby daughter Azaria at Uluru, and her claims (later substantiated in court) that a dingo had taken the child. Meryl's cry in the movie "That Dingo Ate My Baby" has been parodied in many comedy skits, the most famous being Seinfeld where Elaine says "Maybe the dingo ate your baby." MP3s with the phrase "The Dingo Took My Baby" greet people on many websites.

From 1984 to 1990, Streep won six People's Choice Awards for Favorite Motion Picture Actress and, in 1990, was named World-Favorite. Having been named on so many greatest movie star lists, Streep also defied expectations by her happy home life—marriage to sculptor Don Gummer, with four children—and her truthful approach toward the industry and her own presence within it. As she would say when collecting her Emmy award for Angels in America, "There are some days when even I think I'm overrated . . . but not today."

But by 1990, her habit of performing marvelously without fail began to have an unusual effect, in that many critics begin to chide her for her tradition of playing "cold" characters, and often those with accents—in short, characters that weren't humanized to the immediate audience. In the 1990s Streep took to playing roles with greater variety, including farce in Death Becomes Her alongside Goldie Hawn, the movie version of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, 1995's The Bridges of Madison County (largely regarded as her great comeback role), The River Wild— her first and only action film to date—and her noted comic turn in She-Devil. That is not to say that Streep did not maintain her reputation as an acting great—appearing in Marvin's Room, and completing another successful decade with Music of the Heart, for which she learned to play the violin.

Among Meryl Streep's other recent work were guest voices in episodes of The Simpsons and King of the Hill. She voiced the Blue Mecha in the Steven Spielberg-Stanley Kubrick film, A.I.; appeared alongside Nicolas Cage in Adaptation.; played four different roles in the HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner's six-hour play Angels in America; starred alongside Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore in The Hours; and in 2004 took on two additional roles, playing the character originated by Angela Lansbury in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and taking a role alongside Jim Carrey, Emily Browning and Jude Law in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. That same year, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields proclaimed May 27 "Meryl Streep Day".

In July 2001, Meryl Streep returned to the stage for the first time in over 20 years, playing Arkadina in the Public Theatre'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. The all-star cast ensured long lines of people willing to wait as long as 17 hours to acquire the free tickets. Summer 2006 will find her returning to that venue to play the title role in Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children; this new translation by Tony Kushner will be directed by George C. Wolfe.

Streep's most recent film release was October's Prime in which she had a comic role alongside Uma Thurman and Bryan Greenberg. She currently has two films in various stages of production for release in 2006, Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion as well as The Devil Wears Prada (a comedy costarring another one time Vassar College student Anne Hathaway).

This Meryl Streep Biography Page is Copyright © 2004 - 2009 Chuck Ayoub