August 10th | 11 Movies
Meryl Streep is arguably the most respected actress of her generation, having played everything from a male rabbi to an accused murderer, a Holocaust survivor, a nun, a British Prime Minister, famed TV chef Julia Child and notoriously bad singer, Florence Foster Jenkins. Her extraordinary range has earned her a record-breaking 21 Academy Award nominations and 3 wins, one for Best Supporting Actress and two for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She has also won 3 Emmy Awards from 6 nominations, including an Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2024 for “Only Murders in the Building.” TCM is honoring Streep’s outstanding career for the first time with a 24-hour salute on August 10.
Growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s and ‘60s, Streep preferred watching films from the ‘30s and ‘40s, especially those starring women. “I loved Carole Lombard, and I loved Kate Hepburn and Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck. I liked girls with attitude. Moxie.” Despite her love of classic film and appearances in high school musicals, Streep went to Vassar to study costume design. She began to take acting seriously after friends saw her in a play and convinced her that she had talent. Although she enjoyed acting, Streep thought it was “silly” to be a professional actress until she saw Geraldine Page in a play with Christopher Walken. Watching them onstage, Streep felt as though she was “being fed for the first time. You found your tribe; you’ve found your people.”
After Vasser came the Yale School of Drama, where ironically, she was put on academic probation her second year for a “lack of ambition.” Streep had complained to the dean about constantly being cast in plays. “There were only 12 people in my class and people were mad about it. […] I went to the psychiatrist at Yale, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. In four months, it will never be as bad as this. You’ll be in competition with 200,000 other members of Actor’s Equity.’” Streep graduated from Yale in the early 1970s, a time when the United States was in an economic recession and many Broadway theaters had closed. In order to have something to fall back on in case acting didn’t work out, Streep considered going to law school, even studying to take an entrance exam. When test day arrived, she was so exhausted from appearing in a play the night before that she slept through the entire exam. She needn’t have bothered; stage roles came to her almost immediately.
Her first feature film role was the small part of a socialite in Julia (1977), starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. “Daily Variety” announced her casting in their September 1, 1976, edition by mistakenly calling her “Meryl Street,” and the actress found making the film to be a mistake as well. She had to wear a black wig, which she hated, and was unpleasantly surprised that the filmmakers had edited Julia so that a line she had said to Jane Fonda in one scene was moved to a totally different scene. It left her with the feeling that movies were not for her. A year later, Robert De Niro spotted Streep in a play with Raul Julia and wanted her for The Deer Hunter (1978), in which she co-starred with her real-life partner, John Cazale, who she met in 1976 while appearing onstage in “Measure for Measure.” The career boost came at a difficult time for Streep because the 42-year-old Cazale was dying of cancer. The producers allowed him to film all his scenes first, but Cazale would die before the film’s release and Streep’s first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Still mourning Cazale, Streep was filming Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) when her agent told her about a part in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), a ground-breaking film in which a man (Dustin Hoffman) raises his young son alone after his wife leaves him. Streep convinced the producers of both films that she could work on each simultaneously because her part in Kramer vs. Kramer did not give her much screen time. Director Robert Benton was impressed with Streep, calling her work “effortless,” and she, for her part, felt that the respect Benton showed and the freedom he gave her spoiled her for other directors like Woody Allen, who micromanaged.
Streep has said that part of making her roles believable involves creating a backstory and a secret that she never reveals during shooting. In Kramer vs. Kramer, the secret was that her character, Joanna, never loved her husband. “I didn’t want [Hoffman] to know that because it would have affected everything about the way he played his part.” Shooting Kramer vs. Kramer was challenging because Hoffman was in the middle of a divorce, later admitting that he “was acting out on her stuff that I was feeling toward the wife that I was divorcing in real life.” That “stuff” included shocking Streep in a scene where Hoffman smashes his glass. Streep’s very real reaction was left in the film, as was the slap Hoffman gave her in another scene. “[W]hen I see the movie, I see the imprint of his hand on my face from the previous take. That was like a trial by fire. I thought, ‘Ewww, maybe this is ‘The Method’ or something.’ […] It wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had on a film.”
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) had Streep playing a British actress making a historical film, a character she described as “the kind of person who is disoriented for a lot of the time and then finds whatever it is that makes her happy,” which she felt mirrored her own life before deciding to become an actress. Although the film wasn’t a box-office hit, it added to her growing reputation for having what “60 Minutes” correspondent Morley Safer called a “unique gift for not only playing a character but literally becoming her.” She did that again by playing a Polish woman in Sophie’s Choice (1982), a role that established Streep as a master of accents. The horrific “choice” scene in the concentration camp disturbed her so much that she only read it once when she got the script, and again eight months later when it was filmed. Streep likened her silent scream to a nightmare, where she really thought she was screaming as loud as she could, but nothing came out. When she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, she thanked her co-stars Kevin Kline and Peter MacNichol, saying, “Everything I had, I got from looking in their eyes and the great love they gave me.”
Streep formed a lifelong friendship with Cher while working on the biopic Silkwood (1983), playing real-life whistleblower Karen Silkwood, who may have been murdered for exposing wrongdoing at her workplace at a plutonium plant. Cher was nervous to be making one of her first films, especially with an actress of Streep’s reputation for excellence, but the two quickly bonded. Cher later said, “[S]he helped me. I mean, she was unbelievable, because I had no idea what I was doing." The two would reunite in Mamma Mia! Here I Go Again (2018).
Another friendship was born when Streep worked with Jack Nicholson on Ironweed (1987), based on William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two alcoholics living precariously during the Great Depression. The film was too bleak to be a box-office hit, but both Nicholson and Streep were nominated for Academy Awards. The following year, she played another real-life person in A Cry in the Dark (1988), as Australian Lindy Chamberlain, who was falsely accused of killing her daughter when the baby was carried off by a dingo during a camping trip. Streep wasn’t enthusiastic to meet the real Chamberlains because she felt “a huge responsibility” to make as accurate a film as possible. At the time the film was shot, the Chamberlains were still convicted murderers who had been pardoned but not yet exonerated, although the filmmakers believed they were innocent. The case was still so controversial that Streep and co-star Sam Neill were attacked by the media for making the film, an experience Streep said was painful but “it didn’t tear out my soul.” Neill would credit Streep’s sense of humor for getting them through production.
She received a much warmer reception from the residents of Donegal when she made Dancing at Lughnasa (1998), an adaptation of Brian Friel’s 1990 play, portraying a lonely woman in pre-World War II Ireland whose relationship with her sisters is disturbed when two men arrive in town. Her performance was a study in economy, with “New York Times” film critic Janet Maslin writing that Streep “presents a small, effortless epiphany simply by standing still, immersed in the spirit of a lost time and place.”
As a child in New Jersey, Streep had taken lessons with a professional singing instructor, whose students included opera great Beverly Sills, and Streep has sung in several of her films, including Ironweed. Her title role in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) as the real-life wealthy socialite whose love of music was far greater than her non-existent singing talent, forced Streep to work hard to sing badly, with director Stephen Frears having to retake scenes because her singing wasn’t bad enough. As she always does, Streep found something relatable in the character of the seemingly oblivious Jenkins. “I’m a child of the theater and musical theater, I believe in illusion, happiness, sometimes happiness is an illusion we need to prop up and support as much as the dreadful truth, and I feel like part of the lesson Florence can give to people is the old glass half full, half empty. […] [S]he engaged in everything that’s great about being alive and that’s the lesson, just be alive in the moment in which you live and take everything good out of it that you can.”
