This is a true story verging on legend, and I would be remiss not to tell it again:
A young actress auditions for producer Dino De Laurentiis’s 1976 remake of King Kong. Virtually unknown outside New York theater circles, she has zero experience working in film. Her long, blonde hair, porcelain skin, high cheekbones, and aquiline nose combine to form otherworldly beauty: the equivalent of the mysterious muse in a Renaissance painting, a Mona Lisa for the ’70s. People who witnessed the actress’s extraordinary performances onstage could vouch for her talent. But all De Laurentiis sees is her face.
“This is so ugly. Why do you bring me this?” he complains in Italian to son Federico.
Well, this had a name: Meryl Streep. And, unfortunately for De Laurentiis, she studied Italian at Vassar College and understands what he’s saying.
“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,” she retorts in his native tongue, showing herself the door.
It’s pretty safe to assume that De Laurentiis thought twice before repeating the faux pas in an audition room again. He was hardly the last critic to underestimate Meryl, but the moment serves to underline just a few of her character strengths: deep intelligence, grace under pressure, and, when insulted, a steely refusal to humor another Hollywood misogynist. Through ups, downs, more than sixty feature films, dozens of accents, one husband, and four children, Meryl has defied ageism to become the most celebrated actress of the past four decades and counting. She immerses herself in each role, from learning Polish for Sophie’s Choice to bringing Julia Child back to joyous life in Julie & Julia. She never tackles the same character twice. Instead, she leverages her rarified platform to channel a range of unusual, complicated women—Margaret Thatcher, Karen Silkwood, Florence Foster Jenkins—rather than accept the unfulfilling parts for which other actresses must settle: Supportive Wife. Supportive Mother. Supportive (and Mostly Nonspeaking) Love Interest to the Leading Man.
Meryl will have none of that.
Born and raised in New Jersey, she came of age during the second-wave feminist movement and has worn her activism on her sleeve even when it was unfashionable. For instance, in an episode that caused Meryl to be briefly labeled “difficult” and “angry,” she skewered Pretty Woman and other popular films of the time while delivering a speech at the Screen Actors Guild’s first National Women’s Conference in 1990: “There’s very little work for women,” she protested. “And when we do work, we get paid much less than our male counterparts. And what work there is lately is odd.”
Given the options available, she joked, one might assume “the chief occupation of women on Earth was hooking, and I don’t mean rugs.”
That remark likely did not endear her to Pretty Woman fans. But Meryl, more interested in humanizing “unlikable” characters that revealed truths about women than in conforming to two-dimensional stereotypes that appealed to men, had been seriously alarmed: As studios devoted more resources to male stars, pushing them front and center, would she have a harder time finding work that mattered to her? Since turning forty in 1989, a time when leading ladies transitioned to Supportive Mother (see Sally Field in Forrest Gump), were her days numbered as a movie star? At one point, Meryl fielded offers for three different witch roles in the same year. “It was almost like the world was saying or the studios were saying, We don’t know what to do with you,” she said.
Rather than go quietly into the next phase of her career, the Yale Drama grad—for whom acting was a higher calling, not a hobby—plunged forward, choosing material that interested her and winning a pile of awards along the way. She’s earned a record number of Oscar nominations, winning Best Actress twice for Sophie’s Choice and The Iron Lady and Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer.
Remarkably, Meryl’s box-office clout managed to grow with age. The Devil Wears Prada, starring the fifty-six-year-old as an indomitable magazine editor, earned $326 million worldwide. Her wildly popular Mamma Mia! movies nearly tripled that. The irony, of course, is that Meryl risked a lot by refusing to compromise her artistic ideals, and now—at seventy—she’s as bankable as Jennifer Lawrence.
Unlike many artists who lose inspiration over time, Meryl has retained a childlike delight in assuming new identities; she approaches each film as though it were her first. From a distance, she’s imperious and queenly, an untouchable—unknowable—stateswoman. Move in closer, and you’ll discover the mischievous personality that Streepers love to love and haters love to lament: her refined, aristocratic presence hinting at the playful, fun-loving troublemaker underneath; her creative ambition and risk-taking; her moral authority as a vocal critic of Donald Trump, who called her “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood” in an apparent 4 a.m. toilet tweet.
Like the bully in the Oval Office, she courts controversy—and seems to revel in politicizing her pulpit and making her opinions known. Meryl, however, advocates for empathy and equality where Trump emboldens bigots to follow in his path of division and hatred. In these coarsening times, she’s embodied an uptown, twenty-first-century equivalent of Rosie the Riveter, increasingly compelled to roll up her sleeves and fight the good fight. Though Meryl speaks her mind, she often prefers to let her movies do the talking. She blazed the trail for younger thespians, including her daughters, to land the kinds of wide-ranging roles that Robert De Niro got to play. Most of all, she represents a meaningful goal for women: the courage to shed fear and inhibition and live a big, bold, authentic life.
This is the story of a shrewd and opinionated girl who first honed her craft in high school, manifesting a dramatic transformation to homecoming queen; a leading lady who outlasted male costars like Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and the Roberts (De Niro, Redford) with no sign of slowing down; a mother who conquered the entertainment industry while living in small-town Connecticut. It’s the story of the world’s greatest living actor. She’s known for morphing seamlessly into characters sharply divergent from each other, and from her public persona. But each character represents a key part of her, from Joanna Kramer’s independent streak to Miranda Priestly’s exceptional competence.
Before you turn the page, dear reader (or shall I say Streeper?), allow me to quote Stanley “the Tooch” Tucci announcing Miranda’s arrival in Prada: “GIRD YOUR LOINS.”