Why Do We Love Meryl Streep?

There are certain celebrities who are untouchable. People who, for the most part, everybody agrees are pretty awesome, and you're definitely in a minority if you don't think so. You're Beyonce's, if you will. But if we're talking sainted celebrity subcategory actresses, as we do on this channel, we're talking Meryl Streep. Meryl Streep holds a special place in pop culture. With three Oscar wins and 21 Oscar nominations under her belt, she's the most nominated actor ever, by far. And given that she's a regular presence in huge blockbusters that make a ton of money, it's no question. People love Meryl Streep, from the Hollywood elite to the average film consumer. So much so that it's basically taken for granted. So how did this happen? What is it about Meryl Streep that makes her so great? And when did Meryl become Meryl? Today we're going to talk about Meryl's career, what in particular sets her apart from other actors, and how has she stayed on top since the early 80s? What is it about her that makes her so good? Meryl Streep arrived in New York City in 1975 to begin a stage career. And from these early moments, she was considered an actress to be taken seriously. Now we can't know what Meryl was like on stage because theater, but labels like rising and ascending star happened for a reason. Critics saw, quote, nothing short of a succession of resounding triumphs, prompting them to write like, Meryl Streep, remember the name, you'll be hearing it again. In her first season in New York City alone, Meryl landed seven leading roles and nearly won a Tony for 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. It's impressive, of course, to get that many roles, but what astounded audiences and critics alike was her range, which establishes our first and probably most obvious factor in her success, her skill, more specifically, her versatility. In her first two years as a professional, Meryl was in Shakespearean comedies, a Brechtian musical, plays by Chekhov and Tennessee Williams. Critics compared her to Buster Keaton for her physical comedy one moment and praised her as the female equivalent of Laurence Olivier in the next. She could be comical, yet sturdy and mature. Perhaps more important than her ability to convincingly inhabit these characters is that she developed a reputation that she could. Meryl can play anything was pretty much the brand from the beginning, but how we define that versatility has grown and shifted with her career. Meryl entered film with a few high-profile supporting roles that launched her as a verifiable and respected film actress by 1978. And by 1979, she had an Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer, which we'll discuss in a bit more detail later. But it was in 1981 that Meryl finally landed a leading role that would bring acclaim for her versatility to a new medium. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, she played a dual role, essentially the perfect vehicle for showing range. As Roger Ebert pointed out, she is offhandedly contemporary one moment and then gloriously and theatrically Victorian the next. She followed that up with something entirely different and what may be one of the best recorded performances ever. In Sophie's Choice, Meryl plays a Polish survivor of the Holocaust wrestling with haunting memories of the family she once knew while navigating complicated romantic relationships. Sophie was her most elaborate role to date, giving her the space to explore both the highest highs and lowest lows of humanity. Meryl disappears into this character. You can see Sophie thinking and calculating to the point that nothing about her seems like the invention of an actress. I think Vincent Canby described it best. Her performance is a ravishing combination of technical skill and mysterious artistry. And how such a fusion is achieved, I have no idea. All one can do is appreciate it. Part of what made her so effective was her affinity for accents. Sophie's Choice, building on the British accent she used in The French Lieutenant's Woman, highlighted her chameleon-like ability to shift identity and nationality, which became a key aspect of her notoriety. This helps explain why she spent the rest of the 1980s in roles requiring a variety of accents and vocal affectations, typically in period pieces. And yes, I did make a chart. By 1991, the New York Times referred to her as the woman of a thousand accents. I mention this because a lot of skill in acting is really difficult to measure, but accents are a tangible way to observe how Meryl sets herself apart from her peers, and it has been since her early theater days. Eleven of Meryl Streep's 21 Oscar nominations involve some kind of accent, and I'm not even counting what she does in Julia and Julia or The Devil Wears Prada, for example. Compare this to the next most nominated American actresses. Katharine Hepburn never once attempted to change her voice in her life. Bette Davis and Geraldine Page did twice. Glenn Close, Jessica Lange, Ellen Burstyn did once. Jane Fonda never did. To be clear, I don't necessarily mean to suggest a causal relationship here, that accents are the reason Meryl is successful at the Oscars. I mean, the only other frequently nominated American actress with an equal percentage of accents is Amy Adams, and it's clearly not working for her. Rather, what these numbers reveal is that Meryl Streep is trusted with a diversity of identities with a frequency her peers are not. We can see that her roles vary wildly in persona. In the 1980s alone, she transitioned from a Polish Holocaust survivor to an Oklahoma labor activist to a British fighter in the French Resistance to a Danish author to a Sophie's Choice rightly won Meryl her second Oscar in three years, which cemented her in Hollywood's hive mind as a genius. However, the prestige drama accent thing can really only go so far. Although critics regularly singled her out as the greatest actress of her generation, by the late 80s, they basically got bored. It wasn't really interesting anymore to see Meryl endure another tragedy as some variation of a foreign woman. She gained a reputation for intellectualizing her work, for not being organic, or as Ladies Home Journal put it in 1988, for her humorless selection of characters. People wanted to see more Meryl in Meryl Streep movies, to see more than just a hint of her comedic skill. Bernard Weintraub bluntly put it, lighten up, enough with the accents. If she wanted to surprise and re-engage audiences to last in Hollywood, she needed to expand their idea of her versatility beyond drama. So by the late 80s, we see a pretty abrupt shift in the tone of her movies in a concerted effort to diversify her filmography. She Devil, Defending Your Life, Death Becomes Her, did these films actually achieve a new comedic phase for her? Kind of. At the time, most of her attempts in this area were reviewed quite negatively, at least for her. She changed management and as she moved into the 90s and 2000s, sporadically took more traditionally Meryl roles to revive and sustain her career, like The Bridges of Madison County, Angels in America, and The Hours. And then The Devil Wears Prada happened. The Devil Wears Prada is extremely important to the Meryl Streep discourse, because that's when everybody finally bought it. And this is where I would argue that Meryl became Meryl. I think at this point, most people have seen The Devil Wears Prada, or at least have heard some of its more famous quotes. Now, The Devil Wears Prada is a good movie, but it is absolutely not the same without Meryl. Her deep voice calmly and authoritatively puts her inferiors in their place. A slight rise of the eyebrow shows the gravest disdain. And yet through all the witticisms, she conveys a complex inner life, earning sympathy for a character who in less deft hands may have appeared purely antagonistic. The result, crucially, united critics and audiences. The Devil Wears Prada became her highest grossing film to that date, and she gained an entirely new generation of younger fans. Top critics couldn't help but add to the praise. Dennis Lim wrote that if Meryl didn't win an Oscar for this role, it was because in her own iconic institutional way, she's underrated. Ella Taylor wrote, Streep, whose dramatic performances tend toward the overwhelmed and accent heavy, has found a second wind as a comedian. Molly Haskell echoed this sentiment in a tribute in Film Comment Magazine. After years of respecting the work of Meryl Streep, what is it that made audiences suddenly fall in love with her in The Devil Wears Prada? There's a different kind of excitement about Streep that wasn't there before. When she's on screen, it's such outrageous fun that the actress and her career are cast in a new light. Meryl is proving now that she can do effortless as well as strenuous, ensemble as well as star, and enjoy rather than hide behind her talent. I think that pretty much nails it. The Devil Wears Prada opened up Meryl. Her versatility appeared universally accepted as all-encompassing. Meryl became a major box office draw in her late 50s in an industry that considers middle-aged women disposable, and we do see a wider variety of genre in the following phase than in any other throughout her career. Consider that she made Mamma Mia, her greatest box office achievement by far, Doubt, and Julie and Julia in a row. She has the range. And then came The Iron Lady in 2011, for which she won her third Academy Award. The win served less as a congratulations for an especially outstanding performance. If you want good Margaret Thatcher content, watch Glenda Jackson's rant about her in Parliament. And more out of, well, campaigning, and the sense that Meryl had essentially become deified, routinely churned out incredible work, and yet had not been recognized for her achievements since the early 1980s. Once again, her propensity for accents and disappearing into character work carried her across the line. It's pretty incredible that the same woman who played Margaret Thatcher, played Miranda Priestly, played Sophie, played Donna, played Sister Aloysius. Her versatility speaks to her skill, obviously, but also to how Hollywood allows women to function, because her filmography is the exception that proves a rule. So, Hollywood wasn't such a great place for women in the 80s and 90s, mostly because there weren't very many opportunities for them. Consider this headline from 1996, titled, Finally, Enough Actresses to Nominate for Oscars. The article describes how the Academy had for years endured the embarrassment of trying to find five nominees in the Best Actress category, and that many considered the fact that they finally had enough, a fluke. Yikes. Meryl entered Hollywood in the late 1970s, meaning a bulk of her early career was spent in that environment, with many actresses fighting for very few leading roles. Meryl's strength, as we've established, is her versatility. The diversity of her character work led her to being typecast as a prestige actress who is not typecast. She can play anything, be anyone. As Joy Horowitz wrote in 1991, Miss Streep seems to have fashioned her career on being unpredictable. That word, unpredictable, was not a privilege afforded to many actresses in her peer group. Hollywood establishes types, meaning it usually calls upon an actor to play variations of the same role over and over again based on his or her strengths. Whether or not a majority of an actor's roles actually are of a certain type doesn't actually matter, because we end up attributing certain characteristics to entire overs of work anyway. Like how we think of Julie Andrews as a forever nanny, or how it's weird seeing Kieran Knightley in modern clothing because I'm pretty sure she lives in the past somewhere. Very few lead actors avoid this. Notable exceptions include Barbara Stanwyck, kind of, Cate Blanchett. I can see an argument for Nicole Kidman or Toni Collette. There are definitely others, but we're here to talk about Meryl Streep. Her success has a lot to do with her versatility, but more broadly, it also has to do with the boxes most actresses are forced to stay in. So rather than simply looking at Meryl to understand her longevity, we have to look at her peers. If we look at the filmography of actresses who started at a similar time or who are comparable in age, we can clearly see how Hollywood types them. For example, I think most people know what a Diane Keaton role is. She's quirky, a little insecure, wearing some wide-legged pants, and has some sexual hangups she'd like to tell you about. The one-two punch of fatal attraction and dangerous liaisons branded Glenn Close as conniving and villainous for a long time. Sigourney Weaver is tough as hell. Sally Field is spunky and lovable. Sissy Spacek is Southern. Bette Midler is a funny singer. Jessica Lange, though never solely a sex symbol, more of a noir-ish ingenue, had roles that frequently revolved around her looks. Avoiding typecasting gave Meryl maneuverability, meaning more cross-genre opportunities and the perception that she could be more useful longer. Imagine, for example, casting Diane Keaton or Sissy Spacek as Margaret Thatcher. Honestly, I would still pay to see those movies, but something about it doesn't intuitively make sense because we aren't used to seeing them that way. Conversely, I still confuse it's complicated and something's gotta give because there's too much white casual wear and Meryl and Diane could easily switch roles and you'd think nothing of it. Meryl is perceived to be able to do both. Now, this is by no means a qualitative judgment. It's not that other actresses couldn't do anything else, it's that they were rarely asked to and there weren't very many opportunities for them to try. Plus, the window for ample and substantial roles for women is much smaller than their male counterparts. The sad reality is that looks and age affect women's careers to a larger extent than men's. Consider Cary Grant or The Bonds or anyone Grace Kelly was paired with. Ironically, Meryl's longevity is also due in part to the fact that she was never a sex symbol because they have the shortest shelf life. Think Raquel Welch, Sharon Stone, Kathleen Turner, or even Megan Fox not that long ago. Karen Hollinger points out that Streep is unique as a Hollywood actress in that her stardom is almost entirely based on her Over the course of her career, Streep has avoided overly sexual roles and ones that require nudity. That doesn't mean people didn't recognize her beauty. Journalists frequently brought up her hair and her cheekbones, as they should. The key distinction being between elegance and beauty and glamour and sex. Part of Meryl's charm is that she never once presented herself as the hot one, even though she totally could have. Her authenticity takes its root in general disdain for celebrity culture. She doesn't like interviews, has chosen to live in Connecticut for a majority of her career, famously has never mastered the red carpet, and has only been married once to King of Plus One's Don Gummer. Meryl is distant but charismatic, herself and specifically everyone she plays. Now this seeming relatability is another key factor in Meryl's career, because skill alone does not a beloved actor make. Our icons serve some need or tell stories that resonate with us or reflect society in a meaningful way. From the earliest days of her career, Meryl Streep has often chosen roles that have done just that, frequently in subtle ways that make her a more accessible figure to many women of her generation. Molly Haskell writes, even when not overtly feminist, her films of the late 70s and 80s are hooked into the American cinema's ongoing struggle to sort out its ideas and feelings about modern womanhood. Probably the best example of this is Kramer vs. Kramer. Released in 1979, the film spoke to very real conflicts women had with the traditional family structure in the later stages of second wave feminism. At face value, Meryl's character is the least sympathetic in the film. Turns out abandoning your child is not a good look. But where others may have easily fallen into demonization, Meryl instead found nuance by closely working with the director, in some cases rewriting her own lines, to ensure that the audience understood her character's revolutionary self-actualization. She speaks about feeling robbed of herself, of intense guilt. So while not a film specifically about her or the women's movement, it felt in touch with the inner turmoil of many women of that time. Meryl won her first Oscar for this role and continued to find moments that connected her with audiences through different stages of adulthood and related to the changing status of women in society. Take this scene in Plenty from 1985, a time when many working women were adjusting to majority male office spaces on a large scale. Meryl's character, the lone woman at this meeting, makes a suggestion which is promptly ignored. When a male colleague rephrases the exact same suggestion, the group embraces it. Later, she expresses the anxiety of negotiating these gender dynamics to a friend. And so with the men that I've met at work, or my friends as you'd say, I usually feel that I'm holding myself in for fear of literally blowing them out of the room. Women recognize these subtle yet poignant moments. They understand a mother in Marvin's room grappling with a rebellious teenage son and an ailing parent, or a woman following her passion to find her career in Julie and Julia, even in Mamma Mia, a mother watching a child enter a new phase in life. It's important to note that these roles intentionally do not alienate audiences. Her work remains within certain boundaries, less likely to turn audiences away. Meryl does play complicated, flawed women, but she is not a risk taker. She never accepts dangerous or controversial roles in the way that, say, Isabelle Huppert frequently does. She's also been careful to so as to avoid audiences associating those things with her characters or using them against her, never taking controversial stances like Jane Fonda or Vanessa Redgrave, for example, at least until recently, which ironically only re-emphasized how much everyone loves her. Look, Mr. Trump, you can refuse to release your taxes. You can call to ban an entire religion. You can play footsie with a dictator, but calling Meryl Streep overrated? No. But even here, she's meeting the times where they're at. Women are undeniably using our political voices more strongly now. For her to do so is only an accurate extension of how she mirrors us. I can't definitively say Meryl Streep is the best actress alive or anything like that. That's borderline impossible to determine. What I can say is that she's continuously worked in an industry that hasn't been super friendly to women, and specifically to older women, and that's really impressive. Obviously, part of that is because she's enormously skilled, but I hope I've shown that this is a broader conversation. It's about how Hollywood treats women generally. It sucks that a working woman over 60 is more of an exception than a rule. This is also about how vital good roles are to a person's career. I hope we never see another year like 1996 where even filling the best actress category feels like an accomplishment. I hope we do see more stories about women that resonate with us and speak to our condition in society. Meryl has succeeded because of these factors cumulatively. We can be thankful for every tear she's made us shed, every laugh, every gasp, learn a lot of lessons from her long and wonderful career, and look forward to what comes next. If I were to do Meryl Streep, it would be more...