Age, Biography and Wiki
Meryl Streep was born on June 22, 1949, making her 75 years old as of June 2025. Born Mary Louise Streep, she is the oldest of three children to Mary Wilkinson Streep, a commercial artist and art editor, and Harry William Streep Jr., a pharmaceutical executive. She is of German, Swiss, and Irish descent and grew up in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Streep's early life was marked by her interest in acting and singing, which she pursued from a young age.
| Occupation | Movie Actress |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 22 June 1949 |
| Age | 76 Years |
| Birth Place | Summit, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Cancer |
| Country | Jersey |
Height, Weight & Measurements
Meryl Streep stands at 5 feet 6 inches (168 cm) tall and has maintained a slender figure throughout her career. Her weight typically ranges around 130 lbs (59 kg), but specific measurements are not widely documented.
| Height | 5 feet 6 inches |
| Weight | 130 lbs |
| Body Measurements | |
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Dating & Relationship Status
Meryl Streep has been married to sculptor Don Gummer since September 15, 1978. The couple has four children together: Henry Wolfe Gummer, Mamie Gummer, Emily Gummer, and Louisa Gummer. There is no recent or credible information indicating that she has married again as of 2025.
Streep made her feature film debut in Julia (1977) and soon established herself as one of the most respected actresses of all time. She has received three Academy Awards, the first for Best Supporting Actress for playing a troubled wife in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), followed by two Best Actress wins for playing a Holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice (1982) and Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011). Throughout her career she has continued to earn critical acclaim for her diverse roles on film ranging from the dramatic in The Deer Hunter (1978), Silkwood (1984), Out of Africa (1985), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Doubt (2008), August: Osage County (2013), Into the Woods (2014), and The Post (2017) to the comedic in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Mamma Mia! (2008), Julie & Julia, It's Complicated (both 2009), and Florence Foster Jenkins (2016).
She has two younger brothers, Harry William Streep III and Dana David Streep, both actors. Streep's mother, whom she has compared in both appearance and manner to Dame Judi Dench, strongly encouraged her daughter and instilled confidence in her from a very young age. Streep said, "She was a mentor because she said to me, 'Meryl, you're capable. You're so great.' She was saying, 'You can do whatever you put your mind to. If you're lazy, you're not going to get it done. But if you put your mind to it, you can do anything.' And I believed her." Although she was naturally more introverted than her mother, when she later needed an injection of confidence in adulthood, she would consult her mother at times for advice.
One of Streep's first professional jobs in 1975 was at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, during which she acted in five plays over six weeks. She moved to New York City in 1975, and was cast by Joseph Papp in a production of Trelawny of the Wells at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, opposite Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow. She went on to appear in five more roles in her first year in New York, including in Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival productions of Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew with Raul Julia, and Measure for Measure opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale. She entered into a relationship with Cazale at this time, and resided with him until his death three years later. She starred in the musical Happy End on Broadway, and won an Obie for her performance in the off-Broadway play Alice at the Palace.
Streep's first feature film role came opposite Jane Fonda in the 1977 film Julia, in which she had a small role during a flashback sequence. Most of her scenes were edited out, but the brief time on screen horrified the actress, "I had a bad wig and they took the words from the scene I shot with Jane and put them in my mouth in a different scene. I thought, I've made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business." However, Streep stated in 2015 that Fonda had a lasting influence on her as an actress, and credited her with opening "probably more doors than I probably even know about". Robert De Niro, who had spotted Streep in her stage production of The Cherry Orchard, suggested that she play the role of his girlfriend in the war film The Deer Hunter (1978). Cazale, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, was also cast in the film, and Streep took on the role of a "vague, stock girlfriend" to remain with Cazale for the duration of filming. Longworth notes that Streep, "Made a case for female empowerment by playing a woman to whom empowerment was a foreign concept–a normal lady from an average American small town, for whom subservience was the only thing she knew". Pauline Kael, who later became a strong critic of Streep, remarked that she was a "real beauty" who brought much freshness to the film with her performance. The film's success exposed Streep to a wider audience and earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
She played the supporting role of Leilah in Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others in a May 1978 "Theater in America" television production for PBS's Great Performances. She replaced Glenn Close, who played the role in the Off-Broadway production at the Phoenix Theatre. Hoping to divert herself from the grief of Cazale's death, Streep accepted a role in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) as the chirpy love interest of Alan Alda, later commenting that she played it on "automatic pilot". She performed the role of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park. That same year she played a supporting role as the former girlfriend turned lesbian in Manhattan (1979) for Woody Allen. Streep later said that Allen did not provide her with a complete script, giving her only the six pages of her own scenes, and did not permit her to improvise a word of her dialogue. Vincent Canby of The New York Times described her performance as being "beautifully played".
In the drama Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep was cast opposite Dustin Hoffman as an unhappily married woman who abandons her husband and child. Streep thought that the script portrayed the female character as "too evil" and insisted that it was not representative of real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles. The makers agreed with her, and the script was revised. In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a wife with a career, and frequented the Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set, watching the interactions between parents and children. The director Robert Benton allowed Streep to write her own dialogue in two key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman, who "hated her guts" at first. Hoffman and producer Stanley R. Jaffe later spoke of Streep's tirelessness, with Hoffman commenting: "She's extraordinarily hard-working, to the extent that she's obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else, but what she's doing." The film was controversial among feminists, but it was a role which film critic Stephen Farber believed displayed Streep's "own emotional intensity", writing that she was one of the "rare performers who can imbue the most routine moments with a hint of mystery".
In 1983, Streep played her first non-fictional character, the nuclear whistleblower and labor union activist Karen Silkwood, who died in a suspicious car accident while investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant, in Mike Nichols' biographical film Silkwood. Streep felt a personal connection to Silkwood, and in preparation, she met with people close to the woman, and in doing so realized that each person saw a different aspect of her personality. She said, "I didn't try to turn myself into Karen. I just tried to look at what she did. I put together every piece of information I could find about her ... What I finally did was look at the events in her life, and try to understand her from the inside". Jack Kroll of Newsweek considered Streep's characterization to have been "brilliant", while Silkwood's boyfriend Drew Stephens expressed approval in that Streep had played Karen as a human being rather than a myth, despite Karen's father Bill thinking that Streep and the film had dumbed his daughter down. Pauline Kael believed that Streep had been miscast.
| Parents | |
| Husband | Don Gummer (m. 1978-2017) |
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Net Worth and Salary
As of 2025, Meryl Streep's net worth is estimated at approximately $95 million to $100 million, depending on the source. Her annual earning capacity is around $5 million to $25 million, depending on her projects and negotiations. She is known for her high standard salary, often commanding $20 million for a single film, although she may accept lower pay for certain roles if they offer backend profits.
Career, Business and Investments
Meryl Streep's career spans over five decades, with notable performances in films like "Sophie's Choice," "Kramer vs. Kramer," "The Devil Wears Prada," and "Little Women." She has won three Academy Awards, among numerous other accolades. Her business ventures are less publicly documented, but she is known for her philanthropic efforts. Streep has been involved in various projects, including working with director Steven Soderbergh on "Let Them All Talk," which sold to HBO Max for $33 million, with Streep earning at least $5 million from the deal.
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress. Known for her versatility and adept accent work, she has been described as "the best actress of her generation". She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over five decades, including three Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, eight Golden Globe Awards, four Emmy Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, in addition to nominations for seven Grammy Awards and a Tony Award.
Although Streep appeared in numerous school plays during her high school years, she was uninterested in serious theater until acting in the play Miss Julie at Vassar College in 1969, in which she gained attention across the campus. Vassar drama professor Clinton J. Atkinson noted, "I don't think anyone ever taught Meryl acting. She really taught herself." Streep demonstrated an early ability to mimic accents and to quickly memorize her lines. She received her AB in drama cum laude in 1971, before applying for an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. At Yale, she supplemented her course fees by working as a waitress and typist, and appeared in over a dozen stage productions per year; at one point, she became overworked and developed ulcers, so she contemplated quitting acting and switching to study law. Streep played a variety of roles on stage, from Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. She was a student of choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, whom she introduced at the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors. Another of her teachers was Robert Lewis, a co-founder of the Actors Studio. Streep disapproved of some of the acting exercises she was asked to do, remarking that one professor taught the emotional recall technique by delving into personal lives in a way she found "obnoxious". She received her MFA in drama from Yale in 1975. She also enrolled as a visiting student at Dartmouth College in 1970, and received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the college in 1981.
In the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, Streep played the leading role of a German woman married to a Jewish artist played by James Woods in Nazi era Germany. She found the material to be "unrelentingly noble" and professed to have taken on the role for financial gain. Streep travelled to Germany and Austria for filming while Cazale remained in New York. Upon her return, Streep found that Cazale's illness had progressed, and she nursed him until his death on March 12, 1978. With an estimated audience of 109 million, Holocaust brought a wider degree of public recognition to Streep, who found herself "on the verge of national visibility". She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance. Despite the awards success, Streep was still not enthusiastic towards her film career and preferred acting on stage.
Social Network
Meryl Streep is not particularly active on social media platforms, preferring to maintain a private life. However, she often uses her platform to advocate for social causes and support various charitable initiatives.
Streep denounced her fervent media coverage at the time as "excessive hype". The story within a story drama The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) was Streep's first leading role. The film paired Streep with Jeremy Irons as contemporary actors, telling their modern story, as well as the Victorian era drama they were performing. Streep developed an English accent for the part, but considered herself a misfit for the role: "I couldn't help wishing that I was more beautiful". A New York magazine article commented that, while many female stars of the past had cultivated a singular identity in their films, Streep was a "chameleon", willing to play any type of role. Streep was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work. The following year, she re-united with Robert Benton for the psychological thriller, Still of the Night (1982), co-starring Roy Scheider and Jessica Tandy. Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, noted that the film was an homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, but that one of its main weaknesses was a lack of chemistry between Streep and Scheider, concluding that Streep "is stunning, but she's not on screen anywhere near long enough".
Education
Meryl Streep attended Cedar Hill Elementary School and Oak Street School. She later attended Bernards High School, where she developed her singing talents. Streep went on to study drama at Vassar College and later earned a degree from Yale School of Drama, where she honed her acting skills.
Streep was raised as a Presbyterian in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and attended Cedar Hill Elementary School and the Oak Street School, which was a junior high school at that time. In her junior high debut, she starred as Louise Heller in the play The Family Upstairs. In 1963, the family moved to Bernardsville, New Jersey, where she attended Bernards High School. Author Karina Longworth described her as a "gawky kid with glasses and frizzy hair", yet noted that she liked to show off in front of the camera in family home movies from a young age. At age 12, Streep was selected to sing at a school recital, leading to her having opera lessons from Estelle Liebling. Despite her talent, she later remarked, "I was singing something I didn't feel and understand. That was an important lesson—not to do that. To find the thing that I could feel through." She quit after four years. Streep had many Catholic school friends, and regularly attended Mass. She was a high school cheerleader for the Bernards High School Mountaineers. She was also chosen as the homecoming queen her senior year.
