Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep is an American actress whose five-decade career has produced 21 Academy Award nominations (the most of any actor in Academy history) and three Academy Award wins (1980 Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer; 1983 Best Actress for Sophie's Choice; 2012 Best Actress for The Iron Lady) — making her the most-acclaimed American screen actress of the 20th and 21st centuries. She was born Mary Louise Streep on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey. Her father Harry William Streep Jr. was a New Jersey pharmaceutical-company executive at Merck, and her mother Mary Wolf Wilkinson was a commercial artist.

Her education at Vassar College (B.A. in Drama, 1971) and the Yale School of Drama (M.F.A. in Drama, 1975) launched her early-career path. Her 1975 New York Public Theater Off-Broadway debut at age 26 in Joseph Papp's Trelawny of the 'Wells' launched her early-career New York theatrical career. Her 1977 first feature-film appearance in Julia (opposite Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave) and her 1978 lead role in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (opposite Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken) launched her late-1970s American film breakthrough.

Her 1979 lead role as Joanna Kramer in Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer (opposite Dustin Hoffman) won her the 1980 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. Her 1982 lead role as Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor Sophie Zawistowski in Alan J. Pakula's Sophie's Choice won her the 1983 Best Actress Academy Award. Her subsequent 1980s American film career produced multiple defining American films — particularly Silkwood (1983), Out of Africa (1985, opposite Robert Redford), Ironweed (1987), and A Cry in the Dark (1988).

Her 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s American film career has produced multiple defining American films — particularly The Bridges of Madison County (1995, opposite Clint Eastwood), The Devil Wears Prada (2006, opposite Anne Hathaway), Doubt (2008, opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman), The Iron Lady (2011, in which she played British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — winning her the 2012 Best Actress Academy Award), The Post (2017, opposite Tom Hanks), and her 2017 lead role in Big Little Lies. She married American sculptor Don Gummer in 1978 and the couple has four children.

Her name Meryl derives from the Welsh Meirion place-name (and is also a contraction of Muriel from the Celtic root meaning "sea bright"). Meryl has been a rare but enduring American girls' name across the late 20th century.