Meryl Streep at 70

In January this year, in New York, the day after the Golden Globes, Meryl Streep met with the 82-year-old British Actress Glenda Jackson – who is playing King Lear on Broadway – for an interview with Interview magazine. It was more like a conversation, really – two giantesses of stage and screen talking stagecraft and politics and life in general. Jackson casually asked Streep if she was working on anything. (We know that she’s signed up to play Aunt March in Little Women later this year, directed by Greta Gerwig and co-starring the likes of Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet, among others.) For the moment, she said, she was taking a rest.

“I’ve been working like mad for quite a while, so I’m getting ready for my first grandchild,” she said. “My daughter’s having a baby in February, so I’m going to go out and ruin her life. I specialise in unsolicited advice.”

Mamie Gummer, Rick Springfield and Meryl Streep attend the Ricki And The Flash New York premiere, 3 August 2015

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Despite being one of the most famous figures in film, Streep has managed to keep her private life largely just that: private. So, while she dropped this detail in conversation with an old friend, at the time of going to press nothing further about her grandchild was known except that her eldest daughter, Mamie, gave birth to a health boy in late February. So, to add to her accolades, Streep is now a grandmother. Streep herself has been married to the same man – sculptor Don Gummer – since 1978, and they have four children (all grown up now).

Her first grandchild has arrived just in time for another milestone awaiting Meryl, whose real name is Mary Louise. (Apparently, her father used to shorten Mary Louise to Meryl, and it stuck.) On 22 June, she will celebrate her 70th birthday. As she nears this landmark in life, it’s worth reflecting on what lies behind Streep’s tremendous success. Because, as anyone will tell you, she holds the record for the most Golden Globe and Oscar nominations, ever. She has been nominated for 21 Academy Awards and 31 Golden Globes. She has won three Oscars (for Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie’s Choice and The Iron Lady) and eight Golden Globes (which, as some wag once pointed out, not only makes her Hollywood’s biggest winner, but also its biggest loser). There’s another one in the family, too: her children once gave their father a fake honorary Oscar.

Right Meryl Streep at the 82nd Academy Awards, 26 February 2012.

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After the 2018 Academy Awards, the couple’s youngest daughter, Louisa Gummer, tweeted, “Fun fact: we once made my dad a fake Oscar for acting comfortable at these things for 40 years straight.”

Apart from her talent and energy, what makes Streep’s success so remarkable is that she hasn’t exactly shied away from the public eye. She’s used her fame as a platform to say what she wants. She’s fearlessly expressed her opinion on a range of issues, taking on the Hollywood bigwigs and doing things her way.

At the 2017 Golden Globes, when Donald Trump was still president elect, she made a subtle but powerful statement about his leadership without even mentioning his name, referring to an incident when he publicly mocked a disabled journalist.

“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful – it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” she said. “Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”

Trump responded on Twitter calling her “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood”, and “a Hillary flunky who lost big”. The fact is that Streep did indeed support Clinton in her campaign, giving a speech at the Democratic National Convention. It was a rare appearance, because, although Streep is frequently outspoken about political issues, she hadn’t made campaign appearances before. Former US president Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2010, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, so she’d had a fan in government before.

But she touched on another issue closer to her heart on that occasion: feminism. Although, when she was young, she said that she would have thought that feminism had to do with “nice nails and clean hair”, and at various other times has shied away from the term. In an interview with Time Out about the film Suffragette, when asked, “Are you a feminist?” she replied, “I am a humanist. I am for a nice, easy balance.”

But at the Democratic Convention she asked pointedly, “What does it take to be the first female anything?” referring to the fact that she expected Clinton to become the US’s first woman president. “It takes grit and it takes grace.”

What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit and it takes grace

Streep herself has shown grit and grace in her own career as she carved out a path for herself in which she played powerful, complex, well-rounded characters for women throughout decades, when most were reduced to unspeaking, unthinking roles in which they’re depicted as nothing more than stand-in parts for narratives centred on male characters.

One of the most famous ways of rating women film characters is the Bechdel test. It asks three simple questions about a film: Does the film feature two named female characters? Do they speak to one another? Do they talk about anything other than a man?

You’d be amazed how many award-winning films fail to meet these simple criteria for their women characters. Streep, however, passes with flying colours, showing that it is indeed possible to carve out a career in which women are represented as fully rounded human beings. Even the box-office pleasers like Mamma Mia, Julie & Julia and The Devil Wears Prada make the grade, which also importantly showed Hollywood that a film that met these criteria could be commercially successful.

In fact, it’s interesting to note that, although now it would seem that Streep can do no wrong, her career path actually shows how commercial success didn’t come easy. For many years, she stuck to her guns in a way that can’t have been easy or comfortable, insisting on roles that met her standards. Feminist or not, to fully realise her craft, her incredible virtuosity with accents and ability to portray complex and nuanced emotion, she needed the characters to be appropriate vehicles for her talent.

While she spent some years working hard in theatre as a young graduate, critical success in film came soon after her debut in 1977. Just one year later, she had her first Oscar nomination for her role as Robert De Niro’s girlfriend in The Deer Hunter. In that film she worked alongside her serious boyfriend of the time, John Cazale, who is famous for his roles in The Godfather movies, among others. Tragically, at just 41, he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. He continued acting in the film, but died in 1978. Streep nursed him until the end, a traumatic time for the 29-year-old.

Its success also brought her money – after Out of Africa, Streep could command $4million a movie.

Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Austrian actor Klaus-Maria Brandauer on the set of Out of Africa, 1985

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Although she won her first Oscar soon after, in 1978 for Kramer vs Kramer, opposite Dustin Hoffman, her first leading role came some years later in the film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981. Still, it took another Oscar-winning performance (Sophie’s Choice) and some years before she found the mainstream stardom that established her career as a delicate balance between being a serious actress and a Hollywood superstar: Out of Africa, a film based on the life of writer Karen Blixen, in which she played opposite Robert Redford.

Dustin Hoffman kisses Meryl Streep in a scene from the film Kramer Vs. Kramer, 1979.

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But people tend to forget the difficult period in the 90s, when Streep was balancing work and motherhood and her star faded somewhat. Nevertheless, it was during this time that she made one of her crucial breakthroughs for women in Hollywood. In one of her notable successes in that difficult decade, Streep starred opposite Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County, about a National Geographic photographer who falls in love with a middle-aged Italian farmer’s wife while on assignment in, you guessed it, Madison County. Karina Longworth, author of the 2014 book Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor, says that in her role as Francesca, Streep became “arguably the first middle-aged actress to be taken seriously by Hollywood as a romantic heroine”.

Above Meryl Streep with actor, director and producer Clint Eastwood on the set of his movie The Bridges of Madison County, 1995.

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Streep was the first middle-aged actress to be taken seriously as a romantic heroine

The book is a fascinating study of Streep as a feminist artist. “I make the case that Streep’s body of work often seems to function as a kind of alternative history of the 20th century from a female perspective,” explains Longworth in an interview for her publishers, Phaidon. “I argue that her choice of roles, her process and the results are frequently actually quite radical, even (or especially) when the projects themselves seem on the surface to be fully mainstream or even conservative in nature.”

Streep came out of the last decade of the 20th century continuing to work on great films, but perhaps not expecting the revival of mainstream superstardom and commercial success that the noughties brought. Nevertheless, with films like The Devil Wears Prada, Mamma Mia! and Julie & Julia, she had major Hollywood hits, and still went on to play serious roles like Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady and Katherine Graham in The Post, more recently.

It’s clear that, although she has used her platform to say what she felt needed to be said, in her work she has actually tread her own courageous path and, in the process, transformed what is possible for a woman in Hollywood.

Never one to sit still, however, Streep is now following many of Hollywood’s biggest film stars onto the greener pastures of TV acting. She appears in the second series of Big Little Lies, which will show later this year, playing the mother-in-law of Nicole Kidman’s character, also starring Reese Witherspoon and Zoe Kravitz.

In her interview with Jackson, she talks about the new venture, as they discuss the ongoing issue that has never quite faded from Streep’s agenda, despite her career having defied it for four decades: the lack of good roles for women. “[T]here seems to be more room in television,” she says. “It’s been great for women, because it was the poor little sister for so long. People looked at it as a lesser art form, so women’s stories could go in there.”

And so, as she nears 70, a new chapter of her career opens, and she’s taking the fight to a new forum. But, once again, it’s her talent that will clear the way: her ability to bring seriousness, complexity and charm to women’s roles. She’s made women of all ages visible – not just for being sexy and beautiful, not just concentrating on seriousness, not just for being funny, but all of these things and more. Perhaps her greatest gift is being a true actress – because as famous as she is, it’s hard even to think of what her real accent sounds like. And she has used her talent to make a difference.