Meryl Streep began her acting career with a level of worship typically reserved for seasoned veterans. From her early work in “The Deer Hunter” (1978) and “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), it quickly became apparent to the sharpest of critics – even the most casual of moviegoers – that the chameleon-like Streep was an unparalleled master of character, accents and genres. The benchmark was set for every working actress with Streep’s work as a Polish Nazi camp survivor, damaged by the unthinkable decision she was once forced to make in her Oscar-winning performance in “Sophie’s Choice” (1982). Through “Silkwood” (1983), “Out of Africa” (1985) and “A Cry in the Dark” (1988) Streep continued to set a standard few could hope to achieve – primarily with her mastery of accents, including Polish, Danish and Australian, among others. After he peak in the early 1980s, the multi-Oscar winner spent the subsequent decades maintaining her brilliance, showcasing yet another of her talents – singing – in “Postcards from the Edge” (1990), capturing the aching desire of an aging woman in “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995) and proving she could draw laughter as well as tears in “The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Simply put, Streep could do it all, and generations of actresses coming up behind her, often cited her work as the reason they pursued the craft of acting in the first place.Mary Louise Streep was born on June 22, 1949 in Summit, NJ and raised in Bernardsville, the oldest sibling ahead of two older brothers, Harry and Dana. Her mother was a commercial artist; her father, an executive at a pharmaceutical company. Streep was extremely serious about music as a child, taking opera singing lessons from renowned coach, Estelle Liebling. By high school, shedding her braces and a dark-haired, bespectacled appearance, she willed herself into a dynamic, blonde-haired social butterfly, cheerleading and swimming on the Bernards High School squads and ultimately becoming its homecoming queen. Her mother devised the shortened version of her name, and “Meryl” was christened. Streep also took acting classes in school, which became the dominant interest, leading her to Vassar College and an exchange program for one semester of playwriting and set design at Dartmouth. After earning her acting degree at Vassar in 1971, she headed to the prestigious Yale School of Drama, where her classmates and friends included actress Sigourney Weaver and playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Streep performed in over 40 plays, including “The Father” with Rip Torn, before obtaining her master’s degree in 1975.
Right out of Vassar, Streep had hit the New York stage and made her professional stage debut with “The Playboy of Seville” in 1971, with her Broadway debut coming years later at Lincoln Center in 1975, just out of Yale with “Trelawney of the Wells,” directed by Joseph Papp as part of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Streep would return over the coming few years to the festival to appear in several plays, including Shakespeare works like “Henry V,” “Measure for Measure” and “The Taming of the Shrew,“ but in 1976, earned a Tony Award nomination for Tennessee Williams' "27 Wagons Full of Cotton," which she had doubled up alongside Arthur Miller’s “A Memory of Two Mondays.” Streep edged into both television and film by 1977, earning the media’s top honors after only a couple of projects under her belt. She burst onto television screens with CBS’ “The Deadliest Season” (1977) as the wife of a hockey player accused of murdering another player during game play. That year, she also made waves in her feature film debut, “Julia,” starring as the high society friend of Jane Fonda’s Lillian Hellman. Streep was considered for the title character, a WWII resistance member, but her lack of recognition led director Fred Zinnemann to cast Vanessa Redgrave instead. Streep remained in the World War II period, starring opposite James Woods as Inga, a well-to-do German woman attempting to save her Jewish husband from the Nazi concentration camps in the epic NBC miniseries “Holocaust” (1978), for which she won a leading actress Emmy. Streep’s capacity for playing characters of exceptional depth already seemed vast as she closed the year in another big screen period piece, giving a tour-de-force performance as Linda, the wife of a Vietnam War soldier forced to cope with the war’s devastating effects and toll on her husband in Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” (1978). Streep had entered into her first serious romance with the film’s co-star, John Cazale, but was soon living in a hospital room, forced to watch bedside as he slowly succumbed to bone cancer. Six months later, she met a Yale-bred sculptor named Donald Gummer, who was asked by Streep’s brother, Harry – a friend of his former girlfriend – to do some work on her Manhattan loft. The two became roommates and then fell in love, marrying in September of 1978.
After Tony and Emmy wins and just shy of her 30th birthday, Streep solidified her early reign over stage and screen with a supporting actress Oscar nomination for the five-time Oscar-winning “Deer Hunter.” Streep’s nod came on the heels of a small, but pivotal role opposite Woody Allen in his sweetly comical “Manhattan” (1979), with her character Jill, as Allen’s former wife, now living with a woman and writing a tell-all book about their love life. Heading into a new chapter of career and life, she was cultivating an audience of fans eager to watch the rising young star’s increasingly staggering command of craft. She wrapped up the decade with Robert Benton’s adaptation of “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979). Streep won raves opposite Dustin Hoffman, as Joanna Kramer, an unhappy woman who leaves her husband and son, only to return to claim the child in a messy divorce case. Streep’s real life was quite the opposite, as she and Gummer blissfully welcomed a son, Henry, into the fold, with the couple vacating New York to raise their family in northern Connecticut.
At turns sympathetic and icy, Streep’s role in “Kramer” won her an Academy Award in 1980, and the film made winners out of Hoffman, Benton and a nominee out of eight-year-old Justin Henry. Her reputation for immersing herself in character and accents served her well as she donned an impeccable English accent to play both a modern actress and a destitute Victorian woman engaged in parallel love affairs in the Harold Pinter-adapted movie-in-a-movie, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981), bringing her back for a third Oscar nomination. Then came the part by which all others would be measured. Easing flawlessly into a Polish accent with “Sophie’s Choice” (1982), Streep played Sophie Zawistowski, a Brooklyn-based concentration camp survivor living with her schizophrenic lover whose past, as told to their neighbor, reveals her torment from an unthinkable, life-changing decision. Streep’s seamless technique made for one of cinema’s finest and most heartbreaking performances, garnering her a well-earned second Oscar in 1983, a prize rivaled only by that year’s birth of her first daughter, Mary Willa.
She continued to seek out characters with dramatic urgency, and Streep’s instincts proved to be rock solid, as evidenced in “Silkwood” (1983), an account of the doomed, feisty real-life factory whistleblower Karen Silkwood, which netted her another Oscar nomination. Streep lightened things up with the sentimental drama “Falling in Love” (1984), re-teaming with Robert De Niro in a tale of attraction between two modern-day marri