90 days finance girl dating guy grin england

Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress and singer. Often described as the "best actress of her generation",^[1][2] Streep is particularly known for her versatility and accents. She has received a number of accolades, including being nominated for a record 21 Academy Awards, of which she has won three,^[3] and receiving a record 33 Golden Globe nominations, winning nine.^[4]

Streep made her stage debut in Trelawny of the Wells and received a Tony Award nomination for 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and A Memory of Two Mondays in 1976. In 1977, she made her film debut in Julia. In 1978, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for her leading role in the miniseries Holocaust, and received her first Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter. Streep won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a troubled wife in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and went on to establish herself as a film actress in the 1980s. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for starring as a Holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice (1982) and had her biggest commercial success to that point in Out of Africa (1985). She continued to gain critical and awards recognition for her work in the late 1980s and 1990s, but commercial success was varied, with the comedy Death Becomes Her (1992) and the drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995) becoming her biggest earners in that period.

Streep reclaimed her stardom in the 2000s and 2010s with starring roles in Adaptation (2002), The Hours (2002),The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Doubt (2008), Mamma Mia! (2008), Julie & Julia (2009), It's Complicated (2009), Into the Woods (2014), The Post (2017) and Little Women (2019). She also won her third Academy Award for her portrayal of British Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011). Her stage roles include The Public Theater's 2001 revival of The Seagull, and her television roles include two projects for HBO, the miniseries Angels in America (2003), for which she won another Emmy Award, and the drama series Big Little Lies (2019).

Streep has been the recipient of many honorary awards. She was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004, Gala Tribute from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2008, and Kennedy Center Honor in 2011 for her contribution to American culture, through performing arts. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2010 National Medal of Arts, and in 2014, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.^[5] In 2003, the government of France made her a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.^[6] She was awarded the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2017.^[7]

Early life[edit]

Streep as a senior in high school, 1966

Mary Louise Streep was born on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey. She is the daughter of artist Mary Wilkinson Streep and pharmaceutical executive Harry William Streep, Jr.^[8] She has two younger brothers, Harry William Streep III and Dana David Streep, both actors.^[9] Her father was of German and Swiss descent; his lineage traced back to Loffenau, from where Streep's great-great-grandfather, Gottfried Streeb, immigrated to the United States and where one of her ancestors served as mayor (the surname was later changed to "Streep").^[10] Another line of her father's family was from Giswil. Her mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry.^[10] Some of Streep's maternal ancestors lived in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and were descended from 17th-century English immigrants.^[11][12] Her eighth great-grandfather, Lawrence Wilkinson, was one of the first Europeans to settle in Rhode Island.^[13] Streep is also a second cousin seven times removed of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania; records show that her family is among the first purchasers of land in the state.^[13] Her maternal great-great-grandparents, Manus McFadden and Grace Strain, were natives of the Horn Head district of Dunfanaghy in Ireland.^[12][14][15]

Streep as a cheerleader at Bernards High School, 1966

Streep's mother, whom she has compared in both appearance and manner to Dame Judi Dench,^[16] strongly encouraged her daughter and instilled confidence in her from a very young age.^[17] Streep said, "She was a mentor because she said to me, 'Meryl, you're capable. You're so great.' She was saying, 'You can do whatever you put your mind to. If you're lazy, you're not going to get it done. But if you put your mind to it, you can do anything.' And I believed her." Although she was naturally more introverted than her mother, when she later needed an injection of confidence in adulthood, she would at times consult her mother for advice.^[17] Streep was raised as a Presbyterian^[18] in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and attended Cedar Hill Elementary School and the Oak Street School, which was a junior high school at that time. In her junior high debut, she starred as Louise Heller in the play The Family Upstairs.^[19] In 1963, the family moved to Bernardsville, New Jersey, where she attended Bernards High School.^[20] Author Karina Longworth described her as a "gawky kid with glasses and frizzy hair", yet noted that she liked to show off in front of the camera in family home movies from a young age.^[21] At the age of 12, Streep was selected to sing at a school recital, leading to her having opera lessons from Estelle Liebling. Despite her talent, she later remarked, "I was singing something I didn't feel and understand. That was an important lesson—not to do that. To find the thing that I could feel through."^[21] She quit after four years. Streep had many Catholic school friends, and regularly attended Mass.^[22] She was a high school cheerleader for the Bernards High School Mountaineers and was also chosen as the homecoming queen her senior year.^[23] Her family lived on Old Fort Road.

Although Streep appeared in numerous school plays during her high school years, she was uninterested in serious theater until acting in the play Miss Julie at Vassar College in 1969, in which she gained attention across the campus.^[24] Vassar drama professor Clinton J. Atkinson noted, "I don't think anyone ever taught Meryl acting. She really taught herself."^[24] Streep demonstrated an early ability to mimic accents and to quickly memorize her lines. She received her BAcum laude in 1971, before applying for an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. At Yale, she supplemented her course fees by working as a waitress and typist, and appeared in over a dozen stage productions per year; at one point, she became overworked and developed ulcers, so she contemplated quitting acting and switching to study law.^[24] Streep played a variety of roles on stage,^[25] 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.^[26][27] She was a student of choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, whom she introduced at the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors.^[28] Another one of her teachers was Robert Lewis, one of the co-founders of the Actors Studio. Streep disapproved of some of the acting exercises she was asked to do, remarking that one professor taught the emotional recall technique by delving into personal lives in a way she found "obnoxious".^[29][30] She received her MFA from Yale in 1975.^[31] She also enrolled as a visiting student at Dartmouth College in 1970, and received an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the college in 1981.^[31]

Career[edit]

1970s: Theater and film debut[edit]

One of Streep's first professional jobs in 1975 was at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, during which she acted in five plays over six weeks. She moved to New York City in 1975, and was cast by Joseph Papp in a production of Trelawny of the Wells at the Public Theater, opposite Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow.^[29] She went on to appear in five more roles in her first year in New York, including in Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival productions of Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew with Raul Julia, and Measure for Measure opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale.^[32] She entered into a relationship with Cazale at this time, and resided with him until his death three years later.^[29] She starred in the musical Happy End on Broadway, and won an Obie for her performance in the off-Broadway play Alice at the Palace.^[33]

Although Streep had not aspired to become a film actor, Robert De Niro's performance in Taxi Driver (1976) had a profound impact on her; she said to herself, 'That's the kind of actor I want to be when I grow up.'^[29] Streep began auditioning for film roles, and underwent an unsuccessful audition for the lead role in Dino De Laurentiis's King Kong. Laurentiis, referring to Streep as she stood before him, said in Italian to his son: "This is so ugly. Why did you bring me this?"^[21] Unknown to Laurentiis, Streep understood Italian, and she remarked, "I'm very sorry that I'm not as beautiful as I should be, but, you know - this is it. This is what you get."^[24] She continued to work on Broadway, appearing in the 1976 double bill of Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays. She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play.^[34] Streep's other Broadway credits include Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical Happy End, in which she had originally appeared off-Broadway at the Chelsea Theater Center. She received Drama Desk Award nominations for both productions.^[35]

Streep's first feature film role came opposite Jane Fonda in the 1977 film Julia, in which she had a small role during a flashback sequence. Most of her scenes were edited out, but the brief time on screen horrified the actress:

I had a bad wig and they took the words from the scene I shot with Jane and put them in my mouth in a different scene. I thought, I've made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business.^[29]

However, Streep cites Fonda as having a lasting influence on her as an actress, and has credited her as "open[ing] probably more doors than I probably even know about".^[17]

Robert De Niro, who had spotted Streep in her stage production of The Cherry Orchard, suggested that she play the role of his girlfriend in the war film The Deer Hunter (1978).^[36] Cazale, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer,^[37] was also cast in the film, and Streep took on the role of a "vague, stock girlfriend" to remain with Cazale for the duration of filming.^[38][39][40] Longworth notes that Streep:

Made a case for female empowerment by playing a woman to whom empowerment was a foreign concept–a normal lady from an average American small town, for whom subservience was the only thing she knew.^[41]

Pauline Kael, who would later become a strong critic of Streep, remarked that she was a "real beauty" who brought much freshness to the film with her performance.^[42] The film's success exposed Streep to a wider audience and earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.^[43]

In the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, Streep played the leading role of a German woman married to a Jewish artist played by James Woods in Nazi era Germany. She found the material to be "unrelentingly noble" and professed to have taken on the role for financial gain.^[44] Streep travelled to Germany and Austria for filming while Cazale remained in New York. Upon her return, Streep found that Cazale's illness had progressed, and she nursed him until his death on March 12, 1978.^[45][40] With an estimated audience of 109 million, Holocaust brought a wider degree of public recognition to Streep, who found herself "on the verge of national visibility". She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance.^[46] Despite the awards success, Streep was still not enthusiastic towards her film career and preferred acting on stage.^[47]

Hoping to divert herself from the grief of Cazale's death, Streep accepted a role in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) as the chirpy love interest of Alan Alda, later commenting that she played it on "automatic pilot". She performed the role of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park, and also played a supporting role in Manhattan (1979) for Woody Allen. Streep later said that Allen did not provide her with a complete script, giving her only the six pages of her own scenes,^[48] and did not permit her to improvise a word of her dialogue.^[49]

In the drama Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep was cast opposite Dustin Hoffman as an unhappily married woman who abandons her husband and child. Streep thought that the script portrayed the female character as "too evil" and insisted that it was not representative of real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles. The makers agreed with her, and the script was revised.^[50] In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a wife with a career,^[51] and frequented the Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set, watching the interactions between parents and children.^[50] The director Robert Benton allowed Streep to write her own dialogue in two key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman, who "hated her guts" at first.^[52][a] Hoffman and producer Stanley R. Jaffe later spoke of Streep's tirelessness, with Hoffman commenting: "She's extraordinarily hard-working, to the extent that she's obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else, but what she's doing."^[53] The film was controversial among feminists, but it was a role which film critic Stephen Farber believed displayed Streep's "own emotional intensity", writing that she was one of the "rare performers who can imbue the most routine moments with a hint of mystery".^[54]

For Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep won both the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, which she famously left in the ladies' room after giving her speech.^[55][56] She was also awarded the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress,^[57]National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress and National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress for her collective work in her three film releases of 1979.^[58][59] Both The Deer Hunter and Kramer vs. Kramer were major commercial successes and were consecutive winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture.^[60][61]

1980s: Rise to stardom[edit]

In 1979, Streep began workshopping Alice in Concert, a musical version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with writer and composer Elizabeth Swados and director Joseph Papp; the show was put on at New York's Public Theater from December 1980. Frank Rich of The New York Times referred to Streep as the production's "one wonder", but questioned why she devoted so much energy to it.^[47] By 1980, Streep had progressed to leading roles in films. She was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine with the headline "A Star for the 80s"; Jack Kroll commented,

There's a sense of mystery in her acting; she doesn't simply imitate (although she's a great mimic in private). She transmits a sense of danger, a primal unease lying just below the surface of normal behavior.^[62]

Streep denounced her fervent media coverage at the time as "excessive hype".^[62]

The story within a story drama The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) was Streep's first leading role. The film paired Streep with Jeremy Irons as contemporary actors, telling their modern story, as well as the Victorian era drama they were performing. Streep developed an English accent for the part, but considered herself a misfit for the role: " I couldn't help wishing that I was more beautiful".^[63][62][b] A New York magazine article commented that, while many female stars of the past had cultivated a singular identity in their films, Streep was a "chameleon", willing to play any type of role.^[65] Streep was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work.^[66] The following year, she re-united with Robert Benton for the psychological thriller, Still of the Night (1982), co-starring Roy Scheider and Jessica Tandy. Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, noted that the film was an homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, but that one of its main weaknesses was a lack of chemistry between Streep and Scheider, concluding that Streep "is stunning, but she's not on screen anywhere near long enough".^[67]

Greater success came later in the year when Streep starred in the drama Sophie's Choice (also 1982), portraying a Polish survivor of Auschwitz caught in a love triangle between a young naïve writer (Peter MacNicol) and a Jewish intellectual (Kevin Kline). Streep's emotional dramatic performance and her apparent mastery of a Polish accent drew praise.^[68]William Styron wrote the novel with Ursula Andress in mind for the role of Sophie, but Streep was determined to get the role.^[69] Streep filmed the "choice" scene in one take and refused to do it again, finding it extremely painful and emotionally exhausting.^[70] That scene, in which Streep is ordered by an SS guard at Auschwitz to choose which of her two children would be gassed and which would proceed to the labor camp, is her most famous scene, according to Emma Brockes of The Guardian who wrote in 2006: "It's classic Streep, the kind of scene that makes your scalp tighten, but defter in a way is her handling of smaller, harder-to-grasp emotions".^[16] Among several acting awards, Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance,^[71] and her characterization was voted the third greatest movie performance of all time by Premiere magazine.^[72]Roger Ebert said of her delivery:

Streep plays the Brooklyn scenes with an enchanting Polish-American accent (she has the first accent I've ever wanted to hug), and she plays the flashbacks in subtitled German and Polish. There is hardly an emotion that Streep doesn't touch in this movie, and yet we're never aware of her straining. This is one of the most astonishing and yet one of the most unaffected and natural performances I can imagine.^[73]

Pauline Kael, on the contrary, called the film an "infuriatingly bad movie", and thought that Streep "decorporealizes" herself, which she believed explained why her movie heroines "don't seem to be full characters, and why there are no incidental joys to be had from watching her".^[74]

In 1983, Streep played her first non-fictional character, the nuclear whistleblower and labor union activist Karen Silkwood, who died in a suspicious car accident while investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGeeplutonium plant, in Mike Nichols' biographical film Silkwood. Streep felt a personal connection to Silkwood,^[75] and in preparation she met with people close to the woman, and in doing so realized that each person saw a different aspect of her personality.^[76] She said:

I didn't try to turn myself into Karen. I just tried to look at what she did. I put together every piece of information I could find about her ... What I finally did was look at the events in her life, and try to understand her from the inside.^[76]

Jack Kroll of Newsweek considered Streep's characterization to have been "brilliant", while Silkwood's boyfriend Drew Stephens expressed approval in that Streep had played Karen as a human being rather than a myth, despite Karen's father Bill thinking that Streep and the film had dumbed his daughter down. Pauline Kael believed that Streep had been miscast.^[77] Streep next played opposite Robert De Niro in the romance Falling in Love (1984), which was poorly received, and portrayed a fighter for the French Resistance during World War II in the British drama Plenty (1985), adapted from the play by David Hare. For the latter, Roger Ebert wrote that she conveyed "great subtlety; it is hard to play an unbalanced, neurotic, self-destructive woman, and do it with such gentleness and charm ... Streep creates a whole character around a woman who could have simply been a catalogue of symptoms."^[78] In 2008, Molly Haskell praised Streep's performance in Plenty, believing it to be "one of Streep's most difficult and ambiguous" films and "most feminist" role.^[79]

Longworth considers Streep's next release, Out of Africa (1985), to have established her as a Hollywood superstar. In the film, Streep starred as the Danish writer Karen Blixen, opposite Robert Redford's Denys Finch Hatton. Director Sydney Pollack was initially dubious about Streep in the role, as he did not think she was sexy enough, and had considered Jane Seymour for the part. Pollack recalls that Streep impressed him in a different way: "She was so direct, so honest, so without bullshit. There was no shielding between her and me."^[80] Streep and Pollack often clashed during the 101-day shoot in Kenya, particularly over Blixen's voice. Streep had spent much time listening to tapes of Blixen, and began speaking in an old-fashioned and aristocratic fashion, which Pollack thought excessive.^[81] A significant commercial success, the film won a Golden Globe for Best Picture.^[82] It also earned Streep another Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and the film ultimately won Best Picture. Film critic Stanley Kauffmann praised her performance, writing "Meryl Streep is back in top form. This means her performance in Out of Africa is at the highest level of acting in film today."^[83]

Longworth notes that the dramatic success of Out of Africa led to a backlash of critical opinion against Streep in the years that followed, especially as she was now demanding $4 million a picture. Unlike other stars at the time, such as Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise, Streep "never seemed to play herself", and certain critics felt her technical finesse led people to literally see her acting.^[84] Her next films did not appeal to a wide audience; she co-starred with Jack Nicholson in the dramas Heartburn (1986) and Ironweed (1987), in which she sang onscreen for the first time since the television movie Secret Service (1977). In Evil Angels^[c] (1988), she played Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman who had been convicted of the murder of her infant daughter despite claiming that the baby had been taken by a dingo. Filmed in Australia, Streep won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role,^[85][86][87] a Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.^[88] Streep has said of developing the Australian accent in the film: "I had to study a little bit for Australian because it's not dissimilar [to American], so it's like coming from Italian to Spanish. You get a little mixed up."^[16] Vincent Canby of The New York Times referred to her performance as "another stunning performance", played with "the kind of virtuosity that seems to re-define the possibilities of screen acting".^[89]

In 1989, Streep lobbied to play the lead role in Oliver Stone's adaption of the play Evita, but two months before filming was due to commence, she dropped out, citing "exhaustion" initially, although it was later revealed that there was a dispute over her salary.^[90] By the end of the decade, Streep actively looked to star in a comedy. She found the role in She-Devil (1989), a satire that parodied societal obsession with beauty and cosmetic surgery, in which she played a glamorous writer.^[91] Though the film was not a success, Richard Corliss of Time wrote that Streep was the "one reason" to see it, and observed that it marked a departure from the dramatic roles she was known to play.^[92] Reacting to her string of poorly received films, Streep said: "Audiences are shrinking; as the marketing strategy defines more and more narrowly who they want to reach males from 16 to 25 - it's become a chicken-and-egg syndrome. Which came first? First, they release all these summer movies, then do a demographic survey of who's going to see them."^[90]

1990s[edit]

Biographer Karen Hollinger described the early 1990s as a downturn in the popularity of Streep's films, attributing this partly to a critical perception that her comedies had been an attempt to convey a lighter image following several serious, but commercially unsuccessful, dramas, and, more significantly, to the lack of options available to an actress in her forties.^[93] Streep commented that she had limited her options by her preference to work in Los Angeles, close to her family,^[93] a situation that she had anticipated in a 1981 interview when she commented, "By the time an actress hits her mid-forties, no one's interested in her anymore. And if you want to fit a couple of babies into that schedule as well, you've got to pick your parts with great care."^[65] At the Screen Actor's Guild National Women's Conference in 1990, Streep keynoted the first national event, emphasizing the decline in women's work opportunities, pay parity, and role models within the film industry.^[94] She criticized the film industry for downplaying the importance of women both on screen and off.^[88]

After roles in the comedy-drama Postcards from the Edge (1990), and the comedy-fantasy Defending Your Life (1991), Streep starred with Goldie Hawn in the farcical black comedy, Death Becomes Her (1992), with Bruce Willis as their co-star. Streep persuaded writer David Koepp to re-write several of the scenes, particularly the one in which her character has an affair with a younger man, which she believed was "unrealistically male" in its conception. The seven-month shoot was the longest of Streep's career, during which she got into character by "thinking about being slightly pissed off all of the time".^[95] Due to Streep's allergies to numerous cosmetics, special prosthetics had to be designed to age her by ten years to look 54, although Streep believed that they made her look nearer 70.^[96] Longworth considers Death Becomes Her to have been "the most physical performance Streep had yet committed to screen, all broad weeping, smirking, and eye-rolling".^[97] Although it was a commercial success, earning $15.1 million in just five days, Streep's contribution to comedy was generally not taken well by critics.^[98]Time's Richard Corliss wrote approvingly of Streep's "wicked-witch routine" but dismissed the film as "She-Devil with a make-over" and one which "hates women".^[99][98] Streep later admitted to having disliked filming the scenes involving the heavy special effects and vowed to never work on another film with heavy special effects again.^[100]

Streep appeared with Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close and Winona Ryder in The House of the Spirits (1993), set in Chile during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. The film was not well received by critics.^[101]Anthony Lane of The New Yorker wrote: "This is really quite an achievement. It brings together Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas, and Vanessa Redgrave and insures that, without exception, they all give their worst performances ever".^[101] The following year, Streep starred in The River Wild, as the mother of children on a whitewater rafting trip who encounter two violent criminals (Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly) in the wilderness. Though critical reaction was generally mixed, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone found her to be "strong, sassy and looser than she has ever been onscreen".^[102]

Streep's most successful film of the decade was the romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995) directed by Clint Eastwood, who adapted the film from Robert James Waller's novel of the same name.^[103] It relates the story of Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), a photographer working for National Geographic, who has a love affair with a middle-aged Italian farm wife Francesca (Streep). Though Streep disliked the novel it was based on, she found the script to be a special opportunity for an actress her age.^[104] She gained weight for the part, and dressed differently from the character in the book to emulate voluptuous Italian film stars such as Sophia Loren. Both Loren and Anna Magnani were an influence in her portrayal, and Streep viewed Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962) prior to filming.^[105] The film was a box office hit and grossed over $70 million in the United States.^[106] The film, unlike the novel, was warmly received by critics. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Eastwood had managed to create "a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill", while Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal described it as "one of the most pleasurable films in recent memory".^[106] Longworth believes that Streep's performance was "crucial to transforming what could have been a weak soap opera into a vibrant work of historical fiction implicitly critiquing postwar America's stifling culture of domesticity".^[107] She considers it to have been the role in which Streep became "arguably the first middle-aged actress to be taken seriously by Hollywood as a romantic heroine".^[108]

Streep played the estranged sister of Bessie (Diane Keaton), a woman battling leukemia, in Marvin's Room (1996), an adaptation of the play by Scott McPherson. Streep recommended Keaton for the role.^[109] The film also featured Leonardo DiCaprio as the rebellious son of Streep's character. Roger Ebert stated that, "Streep and Keaton, in their different styles, find ways to make Lee and Bessie into much more than the expression of their problems."^[110] The film was well received, and Streep earned another Golden Globe nomination for her performance.^[56]

Streep's performance in ...First Do No Harm (1997) garnered her a second Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie. In 1998, Streep first appeared opposite Michael Gambon and Catherine McCormack in Pat O'Connor's Dancing at Lughnasa, another broadway adaptation, which was entered into the Venice Film Festival in its year of release. ^[111]Janet Maslin of The New York Times remarked that "Meryl Streep has made many a grand acting gesture in her career, but the way she simply peers out a window in Dancing at Lughnasa ranks with the best. Everything the viewer need know about Kate Mundy, the woman she plays here, is written on that prim, lonely face and its flabbergasted gaze."^[112] Later that year, she played a housewife dying of cancer in One True Thing. The film met with positive reviews. Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle declared, "After One True Thing, critics who persist in the fiction that Streep is a cold and technical actress will need to get their heads examined. She is so instinctive and natural - so thoroughly in the moment and operating on flights of inspiration - that she's able to give us a woman who's at once wildly idiosyncratic and utterly believable."^[113]Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan noted that her role "is one of the least self-consciously dramatic and surface showy of her career," but she "adds a level of honesty and reality that makes [her performance] one of her most moving."^[114]

Streep portrayed Roberta Guaspari, a real-life New Yorker who found passion and enlightenment teaching violin to the inner-city kids of East Harlem, in the music drama Music of the Heart (1999). Streep replaced singer Madonna, who left the project before filming began due to creative differences with director Wes Craven.^[115][116] Required to perform on the violin, Streep went through two months of intense training, five to six hours a day.^[115] Streep received nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance. Roger Ebert wrote that "Meryl Streep is known for her mastery of accents; she may be the most versatile speaker in the movies. Here you might think she has no accent, unless you've heard her real speaking voice; then you realize that Guaspari's speaking style is no less a particular achievement than Streep's other accents. This is not Streep's voice, but someone else's - with a certain flat quality, as if later education and refinement came after a somewhat unsophisticated childhood."^[117]

2000s[edit]

Streep entered the 2000s with a voice cameo in Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), a science fiction film about a childlike android, played by Haley Joel Osment.^[118] The same year, Streep co-hosted the annual Nobel Peace Prize Concert with Liam Neeson which was held in Oslo, Norway, on December 11, 2001, in honour of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the United Nations and Kofi Annan.^[119][120] In 2001, Streep returned to the stage for the first time in more than twenty years, playing Arkadina in The Public Theater's revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, John Goodman, Marcia Gay Harden, Stephen Spinella, Debra Monk, Larry Pine and Philip Seymour Hoffman.^[121] Streep's son, Henry Gummer, later to be known as musician Henry Wolfe, was also featured in the play in the role of Yakov, a hired workman.

The same year, Streep began work on Spike Jonze's comedy-drama Adaptation. (2002), in which she portrayed real-life journalist Susan Orlean. Lauded by critics and viewers alike,^[122] the film won Streep her fourth Golden Globe in the Best Supporting Actress category.^[56]A. O. Scott in The New York Times considered Streep's portrayal of Orlean to have been "played with impish composure", noting the contrast in her "wittily realized" character with love interest Chris Cooper's "lank-haired, toothless charisma" as the autodidact arrested for poaching rare orchids.^[123] Streep appeared alongside Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore in Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002), based on the 1999 novel by Michael Cunningham. Focusing on three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, the film was generally well received and won all three leading actresses a Silver Bear for Best Actress.^[124]

In 2003, Streep re-united with Mike Nichols to star with Al Pacino and Emma Thompson in the HBO's adaptation of Tony Kushner's six-hour play Angels in America, the story of two couples whose relationships dissolve amidst the backdrop of Reagan era politics. Streep, who was cast in four roles in the miniseries, received her second Emmy Award and fifth Golden Globe for her performance.^[56][125] She appeared in Jonathan Demme's moderately successful remake of The Manchurian Candidate in 2004,^[126] co-starring Denzel Washington, playing the role of a woman who is both a U.S. senator and the manipulative, ruthless mother of a vice-presidential candidate.^[127] The same year, she played the supporting role of Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events alongside Jim Carrey, based on the first three novels in Snicket's book series. The black comedy received generally favorable reviews from critics,^[128] and won the Academy Award for Best Makeup.^[129] Streep also narrated the film Monet's Palate.^[130] Streep was next cast in the comedy film Prime (2005), directed by Ben Younger. In the film, she played Lisa Metzger, the Jewish psychoanalyst of a divorced and lonesome business-woman, played by Uma Thurman, who enters a relationship with Metzger's 23-year-old son (Bryan Greenberg). A modest mainstream success, it eventually grossed US$67.9 million internationally.^[131]Roger Ebert noted how Streep had "that ability to cut through the solemnity of a scene with a zinger that reveals how all human effort is, after all, comic at some level".^[132]

In August and September 2006, Streep starred onstage at The Public Theater's production of Mother Courage and Her Children at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.^[133] The Public Theater production was a new translation by playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), with songs in the Weill/Brecht style written by composer Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change); veteran director George C. Wolfe was at the helm. Streep starred alongside Kevin Kline and Austin Pendleton in this three-and-a-half-hour play.^[134][35] Around the same time, Streep, along with Lily Tomlin, portrayed the last two members of what was once a popular family country music act in Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion (2006). A comedic ensemble piece featuring Lindsay Lohan, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline and Woody Harrelson, the film revolves around the behind-the-scenes activities at the long-running public radio show of the same name. The film grossed more than US$26 million, the majority of which came from domestic markets.^[135]

Commercially, Streep fared better with a role in The Devil Wears Prada (also 2006), a loose screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel of the same name. Streep portrayed the powerful and demanding Miranda Priestly, fashion magazine editor (and boss of a recent college graduate played by Anne Hathaway). Though the overall film received mixed reviews, her portrayal, of what Ebert calls the "poised and imperious Miranda",^[136] drew rave reviews from critics, and earned her many award nominations, including her record-setting 14th Oscar bid, as well as another Golden Globe.^[137][138] On its commercial release, the film became Streep's biggest commercial success to this point, grossing more than US$326.5 million worldwide.^[139]

She portrayed a wealthy university patron in Chen Shi-zheng's much-delayed feature drama Dark Matter, a film about a Chinese science graduate student who becomes violent after dealing with academic politics at a U.S. university. Inspired by the events of the 1991 University of Iowa shooting,^[140] and initially scheduled for a 2007 release, producers and investors decided to shelve Dark Matter out of respect for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007.