Meryl Streep

Mary Louise Streep, known professionally as Meryl Streep, was born on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey, to Mary Wilkinson Streep, an artist, and Harry William Streep Jr., a pharmaceutical executive. She has two younger brothers, Harry William Streep III and Dana David Streep, both actors. Raised as a Presbyterian in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, she attended Cedar Hill Elementary School, the Oak Street School, and later Bernards High School in Bernardsville, where the family relocated in 1963. During her high school years she served as a cheerleader for the Bernards High School Mountaineers and was selected as homecoming queen in her senior year. At age 12 she began opera lessons with Estelle Liebling after being chosen to sing at a school recital, though she discontinued the training after four years.

Streep's serious engagement with theater began at Vassar College, where her performance in Miss Julie in 1969 drew campus-wide attention. Drama professor Clinton J. Atkinson observed that she largely taught herself to act. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in drama cum laude from Vassar in 1971, then pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the Yale School of Drama, financing her studies by working as a waitress and typist while appearing in more than a dozen stage productions per year. At Yale she studied under choreographer Carmen de Lavallade and Robert Lewis, a co-founder of the Actors Studio, and performed roles ranging from Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an elderly woman in a wheelchair in a comedy by Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. She received her MFA in 1975. She also enrolled as a visiting student at Dartmouth College in 1970 and received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Dartmouth in 1981.

Following her graduation from Yale, Streep moved to New York City in 1975 and quickly established herself on stage. One of her first professional engagements was at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, where she acted in five plays over six weeks. She was then cast by producer Joseph Papp in a production of Trelawny of the Wells at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, appearing alongside Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow. That same year she took part in several New York Shakespeare Festival productions, including Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew with Raul Julia, and Measure for Measure opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale. She entered into a relationship with Cazale during this period and lived with him until his death three years later. She also won an Obie Award for her performance in the off-Broadway production Alice at the Palace.

Streep's Broadway career ran from 1975 to 1977 and encompassed four productions. In addition to Trelawny of the Wells, she appeared in the 1976 double bill of Tennessee Williams's 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays, for which she received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and earned a Theatre World Award in 1976. She also appeared in The Cherry Orchard and starred in the musical Happy End. Her stage work in this concentrated period established her reputation before she transitioned to film.

Although Streep had not initially sought a film career, Robert De Niro's performance in Taxi Driver made a strong impression on her and prompted her to begin auditioning for screen roles. An early audition for the lead in Dino De Laurentiis's 1976 remake of King Kong was unsuccessful; De Laurentiis remarked in Italian, unaware that Streep understood the language, that she was not attractive enough, and she responded directly to him in Italian. Her film debut came with Julia in 1977, followed by her first Academy Award nomination for The Deer Hunter in 1978. She won her first Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, a role she shaped in part by advocating to rewrite her character's courtroom testimony, shifting the portrayal from a secondary antagonist to one centered on a woman's autonomy.

Throughout the 1980s Streep became one of the leading actresses in American cinema, appearing in The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1981, Sophie's Choice in 1982, Out of Africa in 1985, and A Cry in the Dark in 1988, the last of which earned her the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. After broadening her range across various genres in the 1990s, she reached a new level of commercial prominence in the following decade, leading the high-grossing The Devil Wears Prada in 2006 and the musical Mamma Mia! in 2008, while also receiving critical recognition for Doubt in 2008 and The Iron Lady in 2011, the latter bringing her a third Academy Award. Her career encompasses more than 64 films, 18 television projects, over 20 musical recordings, and more than 30 audiobooks.

Among her career honors are three Academy Awards, eight Golden Globe Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. She holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations and Golden Globe nominations of any performer, with 21 and 34 respectively. Additional distinctions include the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Honorary Palme d'Or, the Kennedy Center Honor, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, an Honorary César, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded in 2014.