Meryl Streep is one of Hollywood’s most versatile, talented and respected actresses who has enjoyed a career that has spanned over thirty years. So it’s hard to believe that she has won just two Oscars, despite fourteen nominations.
So as she is FemaleFirst’s Icon of the Month we have looked back over her long and varied career to pick out some of her best performances.
Sophie’s Choice
Directed by Alan J Pakula and also starring Kevin Kline Sophie’s Choice is widely regarded as one of the best Holocaust movies.
The film follows Stingo, an aspiring young writer who moves to New York just post-WWII to a Brooklyn boarding house where he becomes friends with Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline), a Jewish research chemist and Nathan’s girlfriend, Polish refugee Sophie Zawistowska (Meryl Streep).
Nathan and Sophie’s relationship is clouded by Nathan’s violent behaviour, his uncontrollable jealousy, and Sophie’s unexpressed but troubling memories of her war experience.
Her stories about her life during the war begin to unravel, exposing her as a liar and adding a tone of mystery to the strained relationship between Nathan, Stingo, and herself.
An adaptation of William Styron’s best selling novel the film looks at Sophie’s time in Auschwitz the pain that she suffered and the horror that she witnessed. For her performance Streep won her one and only Oscar for Best Actress.
Kramer vs Kramer
Released in 1979 Robert Benton’s heartbreaking adaptation Kramer Vs Kramer, an Avery Corman novel, about the aftermath of divorce is this week’s must see movie. When dutiful wife and mother Joanna (Meryl Streep) decides to leave Ted (Dustin Hoffman), an advertising executive, she also leaves him with the responsibility of caring for their young son, Billy (Justin Henry). The situation proves to be especially difficult since the workaholic father has never really taken care of the boy and, in truth, barely knows him. Things are rough at first, but as the two become accustomed to life without Joanna and Ted’s caretaking skills improve, father and son finally develop a relationship. As Ted devotes more time to his son and less to his work, however, the latter suffers, and Ted’s subsequent firing coincides with the return of Joanna, who wants her son back. Kramer Vs Kramer is complex story of families and the complicated world of parenthood as Benton explores on whose shoulders the task of raising a child falls.
This film had a major social impact as the roles of mothers and fathers were changing throughout the seventies and the film was praised for showing both sides of the argument to gain custody of the child.
For her performance Streep once again found herself in the Oscar spotlight as she won the best Supporting Actress gong.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
In 1982 The French Lieutenant’s Woman was another literary adaptation for Streep as she joined with Jeremy Irons as John Fowles’ complex romantic novel made it to the big screen.
Set in 1867, Sarah Woodrough (Meryl Streep), a beautiful young woman, is condemned by society and driven into a deep melancholy because of her tragic affair with a French lieutenant.
Fowles adds depth and texture to the story by including direct historical asides and scientific lessons by Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons), a wealthy amateur paleontologist and follower of Charles Darwin.
In addition, there is a film within the film in which modern-day (1981) characters Anna (Streep) and Mike (Irons) provide comments on the characters they’re portraying, and a little history, but primarily provide a parallel story as they enter an adulterous affair of their own.
Streep was the only member of the cast to be nominated at the Oscars, but she lost out on Best Actress to Katharine Hepburn for On Golden Pond.
Adaptation
Adaptation is the most recent film from the actress to make this list, and is arguably her best work in recent years.
The film stars Nicolas Cage as both Charlie Kaufman himself and his fictionalised identical twin brother, Donald Kaufman.
While the boisterous Donald freeloads off of his sibling and works on a serial-killer movie script, Charlie is tormented by both his own army of neuroses and his new project, adapting The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean into a screenplay.
As Charlie struggles to shape the nonfiction novel into a film, he begins writing himself into the story of Orlean (Meryl Streep), a sad-eyed journalist, and her subject, renegade Florida flower expert John Laroche (Chris Cooper).
The high profile cast was a hit with the critics as Streep went on to win Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes and was nominated for yet another Oscar.
The Deer Hunter
What is amazing about Streep’s performance in The Deer Hunter is that this is only her second time in a feature film, making her debut in Julia a year earlier.
She landed the role of Linda in Michael Cimino’s epic drama which follows the lives of a group of Russian-American friends from a small Pennsylvania industrial town as they prepare to leave for Vietnam, but when they return from the war, their lives are indelibly changed.
For this role she grabbed the attention of Hollywood as a major talent to be watched receiving her first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw