Biography And Filmography:

Starting with her first movie appearance, Meryl Streep showed audiences to be one of the most remarkable actresses of her generation. Throughout her career, she has shown an amazing range, both in comedy roles as well as heavy dramatic parts, and is famous for her ability to utilize foreign accents. Even before her teens, she was studying classical voice. While in high school, she appeared in musicals and went on to major in drama and English at Vassar. After working with a traveling theater company, she enrolled at the Yale School of Drama. 

After graduation, she found a job with Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. In 1976, she appeared in "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" and "A Memory of Two Mondays” where she received a Tony Award nomination as Featured Actress in a Play. Other Broadway roles included three Shakespeare in the Park performances including the part of Isabella in "Measure for Measure" (1976), opposite John Cazale, and "The Taming of the Shrew" (1978).

She appeared in the television movie "The Deadliest Season" (1977) as the wife of a professional hockey player accused of manslaughter, and won an Emmy Award as a Catholic women who marries into a Jewish family in the miniseries "Holocaust" (1978). She took a small role as a sarcastic friend of Jane Fonda's Lillian Hellman in "Julia" (1977), but it was her role as Christopher Walken's girlfriend who learns to stand up for herself in "The Deer Hunter" (1978), starring Robert De Niro, that made critics and audiences notice her. 

The next year, she took three high profile roles. First, as the bitter lesbian ex-wife of Woody Allen in "Manhattan”, then as the Southern mistress of Alan Alda's juvenile politician in "The Seduction of Joe Tynan", and finally, as the unhappy wife of Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer.” The actress walked off with an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for the film.

Moving into starring roles, she showed her skill for accents in the role of actress in "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981). Next she gave what is thought to be one of her best roles - the Polish concentration camp survivor in "Sophie's Choice”, where she was painfully realistic.  For her performance, she won the Best Actress Oscar.

She then played a blue-collar whistle-blower in "Silkwood" (1983), and the British woman who had been a Resistance worker in "Plenty" (1985), and gave another powerful performance in "Out of Africa" (1985). She did well against Jack Nicholson as the discarded and pregnant wife out for revenge in "Heartburn" (1986), and as an alcoholic in "Ironweed" (1987). "Evil Angels" (1988) cast her as Lindy Chamberlain, whose assertion that a dingo took her baby made her the most criticized woman in Australia.

She next was cast as a singer and actress dealing with an arrogant movie-star mother and other addictions in the film version of Carrie Fisher's  "Postcards From the Edge" (1990). While she has admits that the movie had some rough edges, "Death Becomes Her" (1992) with Bruce Willis gave her a chance to joke about Hollywood's youth obsessed culture as she played an aging, egotistical actress who will do anything to keep her beauty.

Streep turned herself into an action hero with "The River Wild" (1994) with Kevin Bacon and Benjamin Bratt, but found greater fortune with the role of the Italian housewife who has a love affair with a photographer in Clint Eastwood's film "The Bridges of Madison County" (1995). She worked well with co-stars Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in "Marvin's Room" (1996), about a leukemia patient who attempts to end a 20-year feud with her sister to get her bone marrow.

Returning to the television, she appeared in the television movie "First Do No Harm" (1997), before taking the role of a journalist's sick mother in "One True Thing", then using an Irish accent as the oldest sister in "Dancing at Lughnasa" (1998). The following year, she won another Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as real-life New York City music teacher Roberta Guaspari-Tzavaras in "Music of the Heart”, the story of a schoolteacher's struggle to teach violin to inner-city Harlem kids.

The actress then took a two-year vacation from Hollywood, appearing briefly as the voice of the Blue Mecha in director Steven Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" with Jude Law. But she made a big return in 2002, appearing in the film "Adaptation" with Nicolas Cage, as real-life writer Susan Orlean, author of the best-selling novel "The Orchid Thief", who in a thrilling mess of truth and fiction becomes the object of the obsessions of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman played by Nicolas Cage. 

She then followed with a role in the modern day segment of "The Hours" with Nicole Kidman, playing book editor and troubled lesbian Clarissa Vaughn planning a good-bye party for her AIDS stricken former lover, a famous author who had nicknamed her "Mrs. Dalloway.” Her performance helped the movie succeed. 

She next appeared in the 2003 miniseries "Angels in America," opposite Al Pacino and Emma Thompson. Her work won her an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie, and a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television. 

She then took on a very challenging role, the remake of the 1962 conspiracy thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) with Denzel Washington, where in the midst of the Gulf War, soldiers are kidnapped and brainwashed for sinister purposes. 

In a more comedic role, she was perfect as the mystified Aunt Josephine in the children's tale "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" (2004) with Jim Carrey and Jude Law, and she showed her comedy skills again in "Prime" (2005) as therapist Lisa Metzger, whose gorgeous but relationship challenged patient (Uma Thurman) strikes up a stimulating love affair that she talks about in detail, with a much-younger.

She then appeared in Garrison Keillor's radio show "A Prairie Home Companion" (2006) with Lindsay Lohan, where she plays country music siren Yolanda Johnson. 

Next was the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" (2006) with Anne Hathaway and Heidi Klum, as the privileged, arrogant and tough New York magazine editor Miranda Priestly. Her performance won her award nominations and wins, including her sixth Golden Globe. She went on to earn another Academy Award nomination, joining Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Kate Winslet in the Best Actress category.

She next ventured into animated voice work with "The Ant Bully" (2006) with other celebrity voiced characters from Nicolas Cage and Julia Roberts in the story about Lucas Nickle, who floods an ant colony with his water gun and is magically shrunken down to insect size and sentenced to hard labor in the ruins. She then starred in the dramatic movie "Dark Matter" (2007), based on actual events, where a Chinese university student responds violently when his chances for a Nobel Prize are dashed by school politics. 

Then she starred with Claire Danes in the romantic drama "Evening" (2007), a drama exploring the romantic past and emotional present of Ann Grant and her daughters. She then teamed with Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon in the dramatic thriller "Rendition" (2007), about a CIA analyst who questions his assignment after witnessing an unorthodox interrogation at a secret detention facility outside the United States. She wrapped her year with the thriller "Lions for Lambs" (2007) with Robert Redford and Tom Cruise, where injuries received by two Army ranger behind enemy lines in Afghanistan set off a sequence of events involving a congressman, a journalist and a professor.

The year 2008 proved to be a good year for the actress, staring with Pierce Brosnan in the musical comedy "Mamma Mia!" (2008), the story of a bride-to-be trying to find her real father told using hit songs by the popular 1970's group ABBA. Next was the dramatic "Doubt" (2008), set in 1964, the plot centers on a nun who confronts a priest after suspecting him abusing a black student. 

She wrapped the year with the biographical drama "Julie & Julia" (2009), a film that follows a government employee who decides to cook her way through legendary cook Julia Child's classic cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in one year's time out of her small Queens kitchen.

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