She makes it look easy: Research the character. Perfect the accent (Australian, Polish, Italian, Danish, Iowan, to name a few). Internalize the gestures. Acquire the skills, even if that means studying violin six hours a day for eight weeks to play a Bach concerto in 1999’s Music of the Heart. And then make everyone forget you’re a Jersey Girl at heart.
Born in Summit, raised in Bernardsville, Streep has remained one of the most admired and accomplished actors in Hollywood for three decades. A great script helps, but even without one she can, as one critic put it, “turn manure into gold dust.”
Unlike stars who play different versions of themselves, Streep disappears into her roles: A Polish Catholic mother caught in the Holocaust in Sophie’s Choice; a Pennsylvania nuclear plant worker investigating her bosses in Silkwood; a lonely Iowa housewife in The Bridges of Madison County; the bitch-boss fashion editor from hell in The Devil Wears Prada; even a wizened, gray-bearded Orthodox rabbi in the opening scenes of Angels in America.
Streep wears her eminence lightly. When she received her thirteenth Oscar nomination (best supporting actress, for 2002’s Adaptation), exceeding Katharine Hepburn’s record for nominations by one, she responded, “I am thrilled and honored to be nominated, but also aghast that anybody could imagine that I could surpass the unsurpassable Katharine Hepburn in any category whatsoever.” Certainly a politic statement, though no doubt sincere. But it’s not the only time Streep has declined to be put on a pedestal. As she once told an interviewer who wanted to know how she stays so down-to-earth, “You can’t get spoiled if you do your own ironing.”