On June 22, 1949, in a small hospital in Summit, New Jersey, a baby girl named Mary Louise Streep was born. Her mother nicknamed her Meryl, and from the time Meryl was a little kid she loved putting on shows in the backyard. Her teachers said she was bossy and bright. By the time she got to Yale University's drama school in her twenties, she was acting in more than 40 plays - sometimes three or four in a single semester.
Meryl's first big movie role came in 1978, in The Deer Hunter. The next year she won her first Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer. From there she barely stopped. She could play anyone - a Polish mother in Sophie's Choice, a tough chef in Julie & Julia, a giggly British prime minister in The Iron Lady, a snobby fashion editor in The Devil Wears Prada, a singing mom on a Greek island in Mamma Mia! For each role, she taught herself new accents, new instruments, even new languages. Reporters once counted at least 14 different accents she had pulled off on screen. She is famous for tiny details, too - quietly changing how a character walks, or making a single eyebrow do all the acting for an entire scene.
By 2017, Meryl had been nominated for 21 Academy Awards - more than any actor in history, man or woman. She has won three. In 2014, President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom and joked that he had a big crush on her. Meryl just laughed. The girl from the New Jersey backyard had quietly become the most-nominated actor ever to walk onto a stage.
