On June 22, 1949, Mary Louise “Meryl” Streep was born. She is an actress from the United States. She is frequently referred to as the “greatest actress of her generation.” Streep is well-known for her accents and versatility.
She had a world-record 21 Academy Award nominations, winning three of them, and a record 32 Golden Globe Award nominations, second only to Katharine Hepburn.
In 2014, President Barack Obama presented Meryl Streep with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Streep made her Broadway debut in Trelawny of the Wells in 1976, and she was nominated for Tony Awards for 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and A Memory of Two Mondays. Julia, her first picture, was released in 1977.
She received her first Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter in 1978 and won a Primetime Emmy Award for her major role in the miniseries Holocaust. Streep won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for her part as a disturbed wife in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
she went on to establish herself as a film actress in the 1980s. She received an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as a Holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice (1982), and Out of Africa was her most commercially successful film to that date (1985).
In the late 1980s and 1990s, she continued to get critical and award accolades for her work, but her economic success was mixed, with the comedies Death Becomes Her (1992) and The Bridges of Madison County (1995) being her highest-grossing films at that time.
Adaptation in 2002, The Hours in2002, The Devil Wears Prada in 2006, Doubt in 2008, Mamma Mia! in 2008, Julie & Julia (2009), It’s Complicated (2009), Into the Woods (2014), The Post (2017), and Little Women (2017) helped Streep recapture her prominence in the 2000s and 2010s (2019).
She also earned her third Academy Award for her performance in The Iron Lady as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (2011). Her theatrical credits include The Public Theater’s 2001 version of The Seagull, as well as two HBO miniseries, Angels in America (2003)and the drama series Big Little Lies (for which she earned another Emmy Award) (2019).
Streep has received numerous honorary degrees. For her contributions to American culture through the performing arts, she received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004, the Film Society of Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 2008, and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2011.
President Barack Obama bestowed the National Medal of Arts on her in 2010 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom on her in 2014. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2003. In 2017, she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globes.
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Meryl Streep – Early Life
On June 22, 1949, Mary Louise Streep was born in Summit, New Jersey. She is the daughter of artist Mary Wilkinson Streep and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Harry William Streep. She has two younger brothers, both of whom are actors, Harry William Streep III and Dana David Streep.
Her father was of German and Swiss ancestry, and one of her ancestors served as mayor of Loffenau, where Streep’s great-great-grandfather, Gottfried Streeb, moved to the United States (the surname was later changed to “Streep”).
Giswil was home to another branch of her father’s family. Her mother’s ancestors were English, German, and Irish. Some of Streep’s maternal grandparents were descended from 17th-century English immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
Lawrence Wilkinson, her ninth great-grandfather, was one of the first Europeans to arrive in Rhode Island. Streep is also a seventh cousin seven times removed of Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn, and documents show that her family was among the state’s early land buyers.
Manus McFadden and Grace Strain, her maternal great-great-grandparents, were born in the Horn Head region of Dunfanaghy, Ireland.
One of her parents had Jewish ancestry as well, however it was Ashkenazi rather than Sephardi, which was counter to her expectations.
Meryl Streep – Education
Streep was uninterested in serious theatre until she starred in Miss Julie at Vassar College in 1969, for which she gained widespread recognition. Clinton J. Atkinson, a theatre professor at Vassar, said, “I don’t believe Meryl was ever taught how to act.
She had to teach herself.” Streep showed early on that she could imitate accents and learn lines swiftly. Before qualifying for an MFA at Yale School of Drama, she obtained her BA cum laude in 1971.
She paid for her classes at Yale by working as a server and typist, and she performed in over a dozen theatre performances per year; at one point, she grew overworked and had ulcers, so she considered leaving acting and moving to law school.
Streep has played a variety of characters on stage, from Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.
She was Carmen de Lavallade’s student, whom she introduced at the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors. Robert Lewis, one of the co-founders of the Actors Studio, was another of her professors.
Streep was critical of several of the acting exercises she was given, claiming that one professor taught the emotional recall technique by probing into people’s personal lives in an “obnoxious” way. In 1975, she obtained her MFA from Yale.
Streep in 1970, studied at Dartmouth College as a visiting student, and In 1981 obtained an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree
Meryl Streep – Personal life
Despite her celebrity, Streep has managed to maintain a very regular personal life for decades, according to author Karina Longworth. Streep had a three-year relationship with actor John Cazale, who died of lung disease in March 1978.
Streep married sculptor Don Gummer six months after Cazale died. Henry Wolfe Gummer (born 1979), a musician, Mary Willa “Mamie” Gummer (born 1983), an actor, Grace Jane Gummer (born 1986), an actress, and Louisa Jacobson Gummer (born 1991), a model, are their four children.
Billie Lourd, the daughter of fellow actress Streep’s goddaughter and close friend Carrie Fisher. The family moved to a $1.8 million private home in Connecticut in August 1985, where they resided until 1990, with an extensive art studio to support Streep’s husband’s business, when they purchased a $3 million mansion in Brentwood, Los Angeles. In 1990, they purchased a $3 million property in Brentwood, Los Angeles.
In 2009, when asked if religion plays a role in her life, Streep said, “I follow no doctrine. I don’t belong to a church, a temple, a synagogue, or an ashram.” In a December 2008 interview, she hinted at her lack of religious belief when she said, “I don’t belong to a church, a temple, a synagogue, or an ashram.”
I’ve always been interested because, while I love the comfort that religion provides, I don’t believe in the power of prayer, or terrible things would have happened. As a result, sitting outside of the available comfort as an intelligent, empathetic, longing human being is a terrible place to be in. But I just can’t go there.”
Meryl Streep – Political views
Streep has identified herself as a member of the American Left. She gave a speech in support of presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
At the 74th Golden Globe Awards in January 2017, Streep received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement, during which she gave a very political speech in which she subtly condemned then-President-elect Donald Trump.
She said that Trump abused his powerful platform by mocking a crippled reporter, Serge F. Kovaleski, whom Trump “outranked in privilege, power, and the potential to strike back,” according to her.
“We all lose when the powerful exploit their power to intimidate,” she concluded. “Hollywood is overrun with outsiders and foreigners, and if we’re all kicked out, you’ll be left with nothing but football and mixed martial arts, which aren’t arts,” she remarked, alluding to Trump’s tough immigration stance.
Trump retweeted Streep, labeling her “one of Hollywood’s most over-rated actresses” and “a Hillary flunky who lost big.”
Streep accused the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes of disproportionately portraying the viewpoints of male film critics while promoting the film Suffragette in 2015, resulting in a skewed ratio that harmed the commercial performance of female-driven films. She continued, “I advise to you that men and women are not the same; they have different tastes.”
“At times, they have similar interests, but at other times, their preferences diverge. If the Tomatometer is tilted so heavily toward one group of tastes that drives box business in the United States.”
She portrayed a character in the Apple TV+ animated short film Here We Are Notes for Living on Planet Earth, which was released in 2020. Streep starred in two films that were both distributed on streaming sites.
She worked with Nicole Kidman in Netflix’s The Prom, a film version of the Broadway musical of the same name; and with director Steven Soderbergh on HBO’s Max comedy film Let Them All Talk. Streep will next be seen in Adam McKay’s Netflix film Don’t Look Up, with Jennifer Lawrence.
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