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Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has built a screen career around transformation, but the pleasure of watching her goes beyond accents or physical detail. She can make restraint feel charged, authority quietly comic and broad comedy unexpectedly precise. Born Mary Louise Streep on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey, she studied drama at Vassar College and earned an MFA from the Yale School of Drama before establishing herself on the New York stage. The French Lieutenant’s Woman gave Streep her first leading film role, pairing her with Jeremy Irons across intertwined contemporary and Victorian stories. She won a BAFTA for the performance. A year later, Sophie’s Choice asked for an altogether more harrowing emotional range; her portrayal of a Polish survivor of Auschwitz earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Out of Africa placed her opposite Robert Redford as Danish writer Karen Blixen, while the following decade showed how readily she could change register. Death Becomes Her let her embrace farcical black comedy alongside Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. In The River Wild, she brought toughness and urgency to the role of a mother confronting violent criminals during a rafting trip. Her brief voice appearance in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence added science fiction to an already varied body of work. The Devil Wears Prada then gave her one of her most widely recognized roles: Miranda Priestly, a powerful fashion magazine editor whose control is conveyed as much through stillness as dialogue. Rather than simply playing Miranda as loud or monstrous, Streep makes composure itself intimidating. Mamma Mia! offered another turn, casting her as a single mother and former girl-group singer in a musical built around ABBA songs. Taken together, these films show the shape of Streep’s career: serious drama, romance, thriller, fantasy comedy, science fiction and musical performance, approached with an attention to character that remains visible even when the surrounding movie changes completely.