#RespectYourElders, Meryl Streep, age 70, is an award-winning American actress. She’s been nominated for 21 Academy Awards, winning three, and has received 31 Golden Globe nominations, winning eight.
Streep was born in Summit, New Jersey to Mary Wolf, a commercial artist and art editor, and Harry William Streep, Jr., a pharmaceutical executive. Her interest in performing came at an early age and she began singing and studying opera at 12 years old. However, she drifted away from opera in high school where she spent her time cheerleading and acting in school plays.
Her passion for acting grew significantly during several well-received performances at Vassar College in New York. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in drama and costume design before enrolling at Yale University where she received a masters degree in fine arts in 1975.
Streep made her Broadway debut the same year she graduated from Yale in a production of “Trelawny of the Wells.” She became well-known to film and television audiences in 1978 with her performances in the film “The Deer Hunter,” which led to her first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and the mini-series “Holocaust,” which won her an Emmy Award.
Her acting success continued through the 80s and 90s, but it was in the 2000s when of her films found massive commercial success. “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Mamma Mia!” were box office hits, and the latter became her highest-grossing film to date, earning $602.6 million worldwide.
Streep has been nicknamed the “chameleon” for her ability to master any accent and dialect.
“Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there,” Streep said.
Streep’s career shows no signs of slowing down. In 2018 she received her twenty-first Oscar nomination for her role in “The Post,” a Steven Spielberg-directed drama about the The Washington Post’s publishing of the Pentagon Papers. Most recently, she co-starred in HBO’s Emmy-winning drama “Big Little Lies.” As the Hollywood star with the record for the most Oscar nominations, Streep has found a formula that she credits for her incredible career.
“The formula of happiness and success is just being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can,” Streep said.