Meryl Streep
Photo Credit: Brigitte Lacombe

Birthdate: June 22, 1949
NJ Town Affiliation: Basking Ridge and Bernardsville

For 50 years, Meryl Streep has brought a vivid array of characters to life in a career that has cut its own unique path from the theater through film and television. Educated in the New Jersey public school system through high school, Ms. Streep graduated cum laude from Vassar College, and received her MFA with honors from Yale University. She began her professional life on the New York stage, where she quickly established her signature versatility and verve as an actor. Within three years of graduation, she received a Tony nomination on Broadway, won an Emmy for “Holocaust” and received her first Academy Award nomination for “The Deer Hunter.” She has since won innumerable critics prizes and awards, including a record-breaking 21 Oscar nominations. She has taken home 3 Oscars, and in an unsurpassed record of 33 Golden Globe nominations, won 8 Globes.

She is most recently featured in Seasons 3 and 4 of Hulu’s hit series “Only Murders in the Building.” Just before that, starred in the first episode of the television series “Extrapolations” on Apple TV, an eight-part series exploring the human stories circling the effects of climate change in the near future, and in a humorous take on the same subject, Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” for Netflix.

Ms. Streep has pursued her interest in protecting the environment through her work with Mothers and Others, a consumer advocacy group that she co-founded in 1989 under the aegis of the Natural Resourced Defense Council. Mothers and Others worked for ten years to promote and educate consumers about sustainable agriculture, at a time when organic and sustainably grown foods were not available across the U.S. Their work helped to establish new pesticide regulations nationwide, and to enable widespread availability of food with low chemical inputs by ensuring growers would have markets for this produce.

Over the years since then she has supported the work of many and varied non-profit organizations in the areas of the environment/climate change, human rights, and social justice, including NRDC, Women for Women International, Equality Now, The Women’s History Museum, The Clooney Foundation for Justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Partners in Health, and the Innocence Project.

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been accorded a Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. She has been awarded an Honorary Cesar by the French Academy, and Honorary Palme D’Or from the Cannes Film Festival, and career achievement awards from the Berlin, San Sebastian, Toronto, Moscow, Telluride and Shanghai film festivals.

In 2008, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, and the 2010 National Medal of Arts from President Obama. In 2011, Ms. Streep was accorded a Kennedy Center Honor, and in 2014 The Presidential Medal of Freedom.

She and Don Gummer are parents of four children and grandparents of five.