How is Meryl Streep Relevant Today

You will hardly find any Bollywood actress who is active in the age of 70 year and rocking. 

In Hollywood, there are few  actresses who have been active till 70 . Meryl Streep is one such star who has crossed 70 and busy in her career. And she is my favorite. 

She began her career on the New York stage in the late 1960s and appeared in several Broadway productions. Streep transitioned to films in the 1970s and soon began earning major accolades, eventually winning Oscars for ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’, ‘Sophie's Choice’ and ‘The Iron Lady’, among a league of nominations. Equally able to wow audiences in drama, comedy and musicals, she has come to be considered one of the greatest actresses of our time.

She was born in June 22, 1949 in Summit, New Jersey , once she became active in her career she was recognized film for her masterly technique, expertise with dialect  and subtly expressive face.

Streep was hardly 12 , she started voice training and took up acting while in Highschool. In 1971 she graduated from Vassar College , NY State in drama  and costume design. She did theatre  at Summer Stock  and studied drama at Yale University , where she earned a master of fine arts degree in 1975. She then moved to  New York City to begin a professional career as an actress. Her first Broadway  appearance was in 1975 with Trelawny of the “Wells.” Two years later she appeared in her first feature film, Julia , but it was her performance in The Deer Hunter a year later  earned Her widespread recognition. Though her role was relatively small, she displayed a quiet softness that contrasted sharply with the bravado of the male characters and deepened the film’s testament to the devastating effects of the Vietnam War  on young Americans. That same year she also starred in the television miniseries Holocaust, for which she won an Emmy Award. 

Over the next 10 years, Streep confirmed her reputation as one of Hollywood’s finest dramatic actresses. Her performances in Kramer Vs Kramer  in the year 1979—as a mother who leaves her young son and then fights to regain his custody—and  thereafter in 1982 in film Sophie’s Choice as a Polish survivor of a Nazi  concentration camp earned  Academy Awards for supporting actress and leading actress, respectively. That were the years when she was casted in variety of roles. She further demonstrated her range and her gifts for rendering complex emotional states and seamless characterization in such roles as a modern-day actress portraying a Victorian woman of mystery in 1981 in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a factory-worker-turned-activist in 1983 in Silkwood and the aristocratic Danish author Isok Dinesen in Out of Africa in 1985. The year 1988 brought her another accolades, she won Cannes Film Festival and New York Film Critics’ Circle awards for best actress for her moving performance in A Cry in the Dark for the role she played - Lindy Chamberlain, the real-life Australian mother accused of having murdered her baby daughter although she claimed that the child was carried off by a dingo. 

Year after year she had given finest roles but by the late 1980s her  reputation as a brilliant technical actress came to be a burden. Her name was typically associated with a serious, often depressing sort of film, and some critics complained that her performances lacked compassion. Then Streep decided to play something different. Took handful of comedies, including Postcards from the Edge (1990) and Death Becomes Her (1992), and in the action-adventure film The River Wild (1994). For the most part, these films were not well received, and Streep returned to dramatic films that required more technical skill and less personal charisma. She gave memorable performances in  The Bridges of Madison Country  (1995), Marvin’s Room (1996), One True Thing (1998), and The Hours (2002).

In 2003 Streep received an unprecedented 13th Academy nomination for best her role as supporting actress in Adaptation ( 2002); prior to that it was Katharine Hepburn whole held the record with 12 nominations. Streep earned another Oscar nomination for best actress in The Devil Wesrs Prada where she played an overbearing fashion magazine editor.  She continued to churn best performances year after year , in 2008 she played Donna, a middle-aged woman reunited with three of her former lovers, in the musical Mamma Mia and later that year starred with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt , it was a character of a nun who suspects a priest of having inappropriate relationships with children at a Catholic school; her performance in the latter film earned Streep another Academy Award nomination. She also garnered critical acclaim for her portrayal of famed American chef  Julia Child in Julie & Julia  In the year 2009, a role for which she bagged a Golden Globe and her 16th Oscar nomination.

Her voice training as a child was one of her attribute in her filmi persona , in 2009 she provided the voice of Mrs. Fox in the animated Fantastic Mrs Fox , based on Ronald Dahl’s children’s book. Same year Streep starred with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin in It’s Complicated , a comedy about a divorced woman having an affair with her remarried ex-husband. I loved her role as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady .  For her performance, Streep earned her eighth Golden Globe Award and third Oscar. 

Even after she completed 63,  she continued to give her best. In 2012,  Hope Springs was her very interesting movie wherein she and Tommy Lee Jones starred as a couple trying to save their stagnant marriage. Next year Streep played a razor-tongued matriarch whose husband has committed suicide in August : Osage County  based on Tracy Letts’s play; for her performance, Streep earned her 18th Oscar nomination.

In 2014 Streep appeared as the dispassionate leader of an ostensibly utopian community in The Giver based on the novel for young readers by Lois Lowry; as a minister’s wife who cares for mentally ill women in the western The Homesman ; and as a vengeful witch in the film adaptation of  Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into The Woods. She was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress for the latter role. Streep then slipped into the role of a feckless (and unsuccessful) rock-and-roll singer who attempts to reconcile with her family in Ricki and the Flash  (2015). After depicting woman-suffrage pioneer Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffrogette In the year 2015, Streep delivered an ebullient and sympathetic performance in the title role of Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), about the tragicomic but ultimately inspiring efforts of a syphilitic society matron to establish an opera career. For her work in the film, Streep received her 20th Oscar nomination.

Streep next starred in The Post, portraying Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post. The drama, directed by Steven Spielberg, chronicles the newspaper’s publication of the Pentagon Papers. For her performance, Streep was nominated for another Academy Award. She then reprised her role as Donna in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and played a disorderly cousin to the eponymous character in Mary Poppins Returns (both 2018). In 2019 Streep took a turn on television, joining the critically acclaimed cast of the HBO series Big Little Lies for its second season. That same year she starred in The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh’s farce about the Panama Papers scandal, and portrayed Aunt March in Little Women, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic.

It is true that Oscars won do not decide talent or creativity. Meryl Streep has received maximum Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Her polished performance in The Post helped her to establish this. Iconic performers ruled Hollywood and international cinema prior to Meryl Streep. Vivian Leigh, Katherine Hepburn and Sophia Loren are only a few. Meryl Streep herself stated, “It is very difficult to match the inimitable Katherine Hepburn.”

As an admirer and her fan, I question to myself - how it is possible to sustain your position for almost forty years as a performer in an industry where there is no dearth of beauty, talent  and fresh faces, it is equally challenging  to align with taste of almost three generations. If you closely examine, you will find that Meryl worked very hard to adopt , reinvent and challenge her own past performances. 

Hollywood can be cruel to actresses as they get older but the town's been good to Meryl Streep. Her latest film, "August: Osage County" did modest business at the box office but it landed Streep her 18th Academy Award nomination continuing her run as the most-nominated actress of all time.