Meryl Streep Biography

Actress. Born on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey. Meryl Streep is considered one of the greatest actresses working today. A graduate of Vassar College and Yale Drama School, she is equally adept at performing on stage or in front of the cameras. Streep began her career on the New York stage in the late 1960s and appeared in several Broadway productions, including a 1977 revival of the Anton Chekhov drama The Cherry Orchard.

Meryl Streep broke into films in the 1970s with a role in the drama Julia (1977). The next year she appeared in The Deer Hunter opposite Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, for which she earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. That same year, she won her first Primetime Emmy for her role in the film Holocaust. In 1979, her portrayal of a woman who abandons her family only to come back and fight for custody of her son in Kramer vs. Kramer brought Streep her first Academy Award win for Best Supporting Actress.

A chameleon on screen, Meryl Streep spent much of the 1980s submerged in a variety of roles. In Sophie's Choice (1982), she convincingly played a Polish woman traumatized by her experiences during the Holocaust. Streep won her second Academy Award—her first for Best Actress—for her work on this film. In Out of Africa (1985), she took on the role of a Danish plantation owner living in Kenya. The role earned her another Academy Award nomination.

As she reached her forties, Streep continued to find challenging roles—a feat many mature actresses have struggled with in Hollywood. She received an Academy Award nomination for her work in several films, including two big-screen adaptations—one of Carrie Fisher's novel Postcards from the Edge (1990) and the other Robert James Waller's romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995), in which she starred opposite Clint Eastwood.

By the start of the new millennium, Meryl Streep was as busy as ever. In 2002, she appeared in two critically acclaimed films — The Hours and Adaptation. Streep was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of author Susan Orlean in Adaptation. The following year, Streep lit up the small screen in the television adaptation of the award-winning play Angels in America. She won her second Emmy Award for her work on the program, which had her tackling several roles.

Streep got a chance to show some of her comic skills as a villain in the political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (2004). Continuing to explore light-hearted fare, she starred in Prime (2005), a romantic comedy with Uma Thurman and Bryan Greenberg. Streep played psychoanalyst Lisa Metzger, whose client falls in love with her son. She also played the inimitable magazine editor, Miranda Priestly, in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), for which she earned Academy Award, SAG and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress. That same year, she was cast as country music singer Yolanda Johnson in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion (2006), and continued in musical roles as Donna in the film adaptation of the ABBA musical, Mamma Mia! (2008).