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Arguably the best actress of all time turned sixty last month (on June 22, 2009). Do your part to celebrate the birthday of one of the most influential and important movies stars in the history of the form – Meryl Streep. It's amazing to look over the career of any movie star and actually have difficulty narrowing it down to a list of great performances to number ten. The fact is that it would be easy to pick TWENTY performances from Streep that are better than the single best turn from the entire career of many of her peers. Segueing beautifully from period pieces to modern films and from comedy to drama, what is most remarkable about her career is the breadth of her material. Think about just last year. How many stars can seamlessly go from an Abba musical to Doubt? The answer is very few and probably none – and she's been making those kind of career transitions for decades. So, please enjoy a very tough-to-choose top ten, in chronological order of Meryl Streep’s best perfomances....
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My deepest apologies to all of you hardcore fans of The Deer Hunter, the film that landed Streep her first Oscar nomination. She's undeniably good in that slightly overrated film, but it just missed the cut for this list. If I was doing eleven, it would have been on it. I choose instead to start with the second of back-to-back Best Picture winners in which Streep starred, Kramer vs. Kramer. Dustin Hoffman is near the top of his game in Kramer, but it's the dimensionality that Streep brings to her role that really makes the film work. Joanna could have just been another shrill, poorly written female character. Women in domestic dramas are often merely "villains" for the male character. But Streep doesn't take parts that are so two-dimensional. And if she does, she changes them. She notoriously re-wrote part of her dialogue in Kramer vs. Kramer, making Joanna completely believable. The film would not have won Best Picture without what Streep brought to it.
Meryl's second Oscar (and the last one that she walked home with over a quarter-century ago) was for one of the best performances in the history of film. Meryl is so good in Alan J. Pakula's film that what she did here inspired what other actresses brought to their roles in the 1980s and 1990s. What's most remarkable about Streep's portrayal of Sophie is the clear devotion to her craft, a commitment that won her the Oscar. Even the simple things like her incredible Polish accent showed an actress willing to settle for nothing but perfection. And, of course, the emotional commitment to a role that must have been devastating to bring to life is something that everyone who has seen Sophie's Choice can simply never forget. It’s the kind of performance that inspires young ladies to become actresses themselves.
What's further from a Polish holocaust survivor than a union activist? Streep's range was apparent with what is arguably her best back-to-back pair of performances from Sophie's Choice to Silkwood. Her fifth Oscar nomination (and she wasn't even 35) came for another emotionally searing turn in Mike Nichols' film about a normal woman thrown into an abnormal situation. The real Karen Silkwood died in a suspicious car accident after trying to expose conditions at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant. With Silkwood, Streep proved again that she could make any woman from any era feel completely believable. With just a few roles and at a relatively young age, Streep was starting to do that rare thing in cinema acting – disappearing into her characters. So many actors and actresses bring their own red carpet personality to their roles, but Silkwood was the film where Streep made it crystal clear that was probably never going to happen with her and that each character, each performance, and each film was going to be distinctly different.
Streep would go on to appear in her last Best Picture winner in 1985's Out of Africa and her work in Plenty and Heartburn are well-worth seeing as well, but all three of those films haven't held up like our choices for her ten best performances. Tough decisions need to be made and the fact is that we could make a list of the ten best Meryl Streep performances of the eighties alone and it would be a great list. We need to spread the wealth. But there IS one more underrated performance from Meryl in the 1980s that just makes the cut – Helen Archer in Ironweed. Working brilliantly with Jack Nicholson, Streep found a way to play “emptiness.” Her portrayal of a Depression-era woman with nothing to hold on to is one of her most truly heartbreaking. And she sings beautifully.
Streep would soon try a string of comedies that would start with the worst film of her career in 1989's She-Devil but she more than made up for it shortly thereafter with great turns in 1990's Postcards From the Edge, 1991's Defending Your Life, and 1992's Death Becomes Her. The first of those three may have been the only nominated for an Oscar (and at this point she was up to NINE nods already), but I believe the latter two have actually stood the test of time a bit better. They certainly have more loyal followings. I adore what Streep brings to both but if I have to choose (and, for the purposes of this piece, I do), I'll take the most underrated performance of her career – Julia in Albert Brooks' excellent Defending Your Life, a comedy about, well, purgatory. Charming, sweet, beautiful, and with perfect comic timing – Streep makes Julia the kind of woman that most men would happily shuffle off this mortal coil just to spend more time with her.
Her tenth Oscar nomination would come for a performance that I feel never gets the credit that it should. The problem is that some people still view The Bridges of Madison County as nothing more than the film version of a wildly popular romantic novel. If you're old enough to remember how HUGE the book was, the film was the kind of thing that turned a lot of viewers off before they even had a chance to see it. Over-saturation can lead viewers to miss something truly great hidden within the popular product. Viewed years after the book was such a phenomenon, it's easier to see how amazing Streep is in this film. She takes a project that could have been manipulative junk and makes it completely believable and heartbreaking. The difference between melodramatic and moving is the difference between what ninety percent of actresses would have done with this kind of a slam-dunk role and what Meryl Streep did instead.
Streep's work in 1996's Marvin's Room is incredibly underrated and she's good in the film that earned her an eleventh nomination, 1998's One True Thing. She wouldn't get out of the 1990s without one more nod, her twelfth for arguably her least deserving turn, 1999's Music of the Heart. Sadly, there are only 4 spots left on the list, and there are at least that many roles that merit consideration in the 2000s, one of her most diverse and creative periods. It started with 2002's Adaptation, a film that won Streep several critics awards for Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe and should have won her the Oscar. I will gladly choose this work over the all-around-overrated The Hours, released the same year. This incredible performance, one of the most perfectly timed comedic portrayals of the decade, still feels fresh and flawless. Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago, the performance that beat Streep at the Oscars? Not as much.
HBO's Angels in America is possibly the best mini-series in the history of television. (It's either that or Band of Brothers.) Streep won the Emmy and the Golden Globe for her work in the adaptation of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-Winning play and it's her work with Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Jeffrey Wright, Patrick Wilson, Justin Kirk, and Mary-Louise Parker that really drives the piece. It is an acting showcase, the kind of work that will be watched for decades to come. It's hard to say what Streep does "right" with Angels in America because she plays several roles and becomes a part of the fabric of Kushner's amazing vision. Perhaps what's notable is that, for six hours, she does absolutely nothing "wrong."
Streep went through one of her longest Academy Award nomination droughts between 2002's Adaptation and 2006's The Devil Wears Prada, but that wasn't even her best performance of that year. Sure, it was the flashiest and it was the kind of role that you knew was going to get attention from the first time you saw the preview. However, her performance in the lesser-known but beloved A Prairie Home Companion is a better choice when one tries to summarize over three decades of work from this masterful actress. There's something so sweet and genuine about Meryl's work here that it almost feels like you get a glimpse beneath the perfectly crafted facade and see the real Streep, riffing with her talented friends for an amazing director. The fact that it was Robert Altman's final film makes everything about Prairie that much more heartbreakingly memorable. Wouldn't every director, especially one so attuned to the craft of acting like Altman, love to have a charming, beautiful, sweet performance from the best actress that ever lived in their final film?
I love Kate Winslet. She's arguably the "Meryl Streep of her generation" and is actually on a similar pace when it comes to Oscar nominations at the same age. At 34, Winslet has six nods and one win, whereas Streep only had five nods, but two wins at the same age. Imagine what Winslet will have done by the time she gets to Streep's age. But she stole what should have been Meryl's third Oscar right out from under her last year. (Actually, it should have been her 4th Oscar because she should have won for Adaptation too.) I don't think Doubt is a perfect film but Streep is absolutely perfect in it. One of the better known actresses in the history of film once again disappears completely into her role. Going from the singing-and-dancing glee of Mamma Mia! to the searing drama of Doubt is one of the most remarkable one-two single-year punches in the history of film. And it’s probably not the last time she’ll do it. What’s most inspiring about Streep is how little she’s faded, doing some of the best work of her career just last year. She shows no signs of slowing down and I can’t wait to see what she brings to the next decade.
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