Meryl Streep: The Making of an Icon Through Education and Training

Meryl Streep, a name synonymous with acting excellence, has captivated audiences for decades with her incredible range and dedication to her craft. Born Mary Louise Streep on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey, she has become one of the most influential figures in Hollywood. This article delves into the formative years of Meryl Streep, exploring her education and training that laid the foundation for her extraordinary career.

Early Life and Education

Meryl Streep's journey began in the small town of Summit, where she was raised as a Presbyterian in Basking Ridge. Her mother, Mary Wilkinson Streep, an artist, played a pivotal role in fostering her confidence and encouraging her aspirations. "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.'"

Streep's early education included attending Cedar Hill Elementary School and Oak Street School in Basking Ridge. Later, her family moved to Bernardsville in 1963, where she attended Bernards High School.

During her school years, Meryl showed an aptitude for languages, particularly French. Her first foray into performing arts occurred at age 12, when she participated in a school's New Year's concert. This experience led some to suggest that she pursue a musical career. She then began vocal lessons and considered becoming an opera singer. However, her involvement in high school musicals gradually shifted her focus toward acting.

Discovering a Passion for Acting

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.Feeling a passion for transformation, Meryl Streep suddenly switched to cheerleading and gave seven years of her life to this craft.

Higher Education and Formal Training

Meryl Streep continued her studies at Vassar College and in 1971 received a bachelor of arts degree in drama. Subsequently, the actress has also received a Master of Fine Arts from Yale School of Drama, during which Streep played the roles of various characters in the local theater club: from the gallant Helen in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" to the 80-year-old lady in the "Idiot Karamazov".

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.

Streep played a variety of roles on stage, 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.

Vassar drama professor Clinton J. Atkinson noted, "I don't think anyone ever taught Meryl acting. She really taught herself." Streep demonstrated an early ability to mimic accents and to quickly memorize her lines.

Early Career and Broadway

After moving to New York, the theatrical career of Meryl Streep went rapidly uphill, and for several years she participated in the best productions in the country. And for her role in Tennessee Williams' play "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" the young actress was nominated for a Tony Award.

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.

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.

Transition to Film

During this period, Streep herself has long thought to try out the work in front of the camera because she was so inspired by Martin Scorseses' "Taxi Driver" (1976). Namely, Robert De Niro as a cab driver who became an idol of the acting performance. Watching De Niro, Meryl Streep said that she wanted to be just that kind of actress: different, daring, and bring something of her own to her characters. After going through several more unsuccessful auditions Robert De Niro called her for his following picture, "The Deer Hunter" (1978).

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.'

Streep began auditioning for film roles, and underwent an unsuccessful audition for the lead role in Dino De Laurentiis's remake of the action adventure King Kong which was released in 1976. De 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?" 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."

Read also: Becoming a Neonatal Nurse

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.

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.

Breakthrough Roles and Critical Acclaim

This step can be considered crucial in the film career of Meryl Streep. And not just because it appeared to be very successful, so Meryl herself was nominated for several prestigious awards, including the Oscars, but overall a great movie! You have to give credit: for the inexperienced director and the young cast, “The Deer Hunter” was quite a risky and challenging project. Meryl Streep was to take part in a three-hour movie novel that took on the responsibility of speaking out on a previously taboo subject in Hollywood, which is the Vietnam War. Meryl Streep played the sensitive bride of the protagonist, who throughout the film is trying to cope with the realization that her lover is no longer the one who was before. Streep's character finds herself forgotten and mentally abandoned because Michael is deeply devoted only to his own thoughts. This is a tragic drama for which both Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep deserve recognition because it still remains one of the strongest couples on the screen.

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.

In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a wife with a career, and frequented the Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set, watching the interactions between parents and children. 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.

For the film, 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.

The 1980s: A Golden Period

After her triumph, Streep received more and more offers. In general, the ‘80s can be called a golden period for the actress, where she showed her ability to the maximum. Her roles vary wildly in persona: she transitioned from a Polish Holocaust survivor to an Oklahoma labor activist, to a British fire in the French Resistance, to a Danish author, to an Australian mother and so on and most strikingly, her role in “Sophie's Choice” (1982) won Meryl Streep her second Oscar in three years!

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". 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. Streep was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work.

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). Among several acting awards, Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance, and her characterization was voted the third greatest movie performance of all time by Premiere magazine.

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-McGee plutonium plant, in Mike Nichols' biographical film Silkwood. Streep felt a personal connection to Silkwood, 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. 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".

In Evil Angels (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, a Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.

The 2000s and Beyond: Commercial Stardom and Continued Acclaim

After expanding into various genres in the 1990s, Streep achieved a new level of commercial stardom in the 2000s. She transitioned from her established dramatic niche to lead high-grossing mainstream successes, portraying a formidable antagonist in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and a singing lead in the musical Mamma Mia! (2008). During this period, she continued to receive critical acclaim for her dramatic turns in Doubt (2008) and The Iron Lady (2011), the latter earning her a third Academy Award.

The undeniable hit of the 2000s was David Frankel's "The Devil Wears Prada". Streep played the role of the powerful and demanding Miranda Priestly, the editor of one of the biggest fashion magazines in New York. Interestingly, Streep's character's prototype is the real-life editor of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour. To portray the oppressive editor, Meryl Streep spent a lot of time with Anna Wintour to understand how geniuses from the fashion world think. Frankly, we don't know where Streep gets her ability to fit precisely into the role. Her character being a sharpened personification of the fashion world has a ruthless look, a sharp mind and subtlety of approach. We can only wonder at the talent of this actress. Bravo!

Here Meryl Streep has once again shown herself not only as a dramatic actress but also as a master of comedy and singing. It is significant that after the movie Meryl Streep released her own song album for which she was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Meryl Streep was once again transformed beyond recognition and relived the life of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher herself criticized her screen image, calling the authors' interpretation inaccurate and biased. One way or another, this could not prevent Streep from again collecting the most important nominations of the year: the eighth Golden Globe, BAFTA Awards, and a third Oscar. "The Iron Lady" allowed Streep to show her talent brilliantly, she plays in different ages and voices, and solves acting problems of different levels of complexity. She plays with makeup much better than some of our famous actors. In a dark blue dress, Meryl is graceful and simple, yet expresses an inflexible, but liberal person.

Also phenomenal is Meryl Streep's performance in "Ricki and the Flash" (2015), in which Streep once again adopted a new image and played a rock musician. We already know about Meryl's vocal abilities, but for this movie, she also mastered the guitar. In the tragicomic mood of the film, Meryl Streep's unexpected and colorful performance diluted the already interesting filmography of the actress.

Streaming Era

Meryl Streep accepted a role in a TV series for the first time in her career: it was the second season of HBO's "Big Little Lies". The first season so impressed the actress that she agreed to participate in the project without even reading the script - and she didn't fail! Amidst such terrific actresses like Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley, Streep delivered a delightful and crafty acting performance, for which she has already received her 33rd Golden Globe nomination.

Since then, Meryl Streep has worked extensively with streaming services such as Netflix and HBO, appearing in their projects on a regular basis. Of course, the Coronavirus pandemic has brought its own changes to the usual routine in Hollywood and now participation in projects of streaming giants is a necessity. However, Meryl Streep has such high credibility for a reason. That's exactly what happened with Adam McKay's recent hit satirical drama "Don't Look Up" (2021), which audiences loved but critics underestimated (we wrote a separate blog about "Don't Look Up", by the way - check it out at the link). Meryl Streep played the sarcastic President of the United States and again opened up to the audience from a new side: she played the comedic elements hilariously funny. It's hard to imagine anyone else for this role.

Legacy and Continued Influence

There will only be more! At 73, Meryl Streep is at the peak of her career and her energy may be the envy of any young actor or actress. The fervor and dedication with which Streep fought for every role, for every character, cannot but be admired. We love Meryl Streep for her ability to change on the screen and bring something new to her character and herself with each film. We love Meryl Streep because she has always tried to show not the characters, but the living and real people on the screen. People who are illogical; people who are selfish; people who make mistakes and pay for them; people who sing and dance; people who laugh and cry. Meryl can play anyone and anything - a trait that can be traced back to her college days when the young actress has played roles from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams.

Meryl Streep cemented her reputation as one of Hollywood’s finest dramatic actresses in 2003 when she received an unprecedented 13th Academy Award nomination.

Hometown Recognition

This announcement formally establishes to the world media that Meryl Streep grew up in Basking Ridge. Purchased in 1955 and later sold on August 13, 1962. A few things have come to light, including that Meryl Streep attended Cedar Hill Elementary School in Basking Ridge. During an NPR interview, Meryl discussed her first public performances at a Christmas Concert at Cedar Hill in December 1960. This formally informs the world that Meryl Streep grew up in Basking Ridge. We want what’s rightly owed to us-a tagline that Meryl Streep grew up in Basking Ridge and moved to Bernardsville in 1963.

tags: #meryl #streep #education #and #training