Meryl Streep, still arguing with the statue critics built around her

The actress everyone agrees is the best living American actress is currently in a Disney comedy sequel that just outgrossed every film she has ever made. The contradiction is the story.

She is the actress American cinema decided to put in marble somewhere around the time of Sophie’s Choice, and she has been picking at the marble ever since. The “greatest living” line gets used about her so reflexively now that the words have stopped meaning anything — they’re affixed, like a brand of laurel, to a working professional who is currently in theaters opposite Anne Hathaway in a Disney comedy that has just become the highest-opening weekend of her career. There is something funny in that, and Streep, who has always been funnier than the canon allows, is letting the joke land.

The voice came first. She was born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey, and raised in the affluent quiet of Bernardsville, the daughter of a pharmaceutical executive of German descent and a commercial artist whose maiden name she still carries inside her own. From age twelve she trained in opera under Estelle Liebling, the same vocal coach who had shaped Beverly Sills. The opera ambition would have been plausible — there are recordings — but it transferred cleanly into theater when she discovered acting at Vassar College, late, in a 1969 production of Miss Julie that made the campus stop pretending she was anything other than the actress of her year. She graduated cum laude in drama in 1971. The Yale School of Drama added the technique, the languages, the appetite for over a dozen productions a season; she came out of New Haven with an MFA and ulcers, and went directly to the Public Theater under Joseph Papp.

She picked up a Tony nomination in 1976 for 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and met John Cazale during a Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure for Measure. Cazale, the unforgettable Fredo of the Godfather films, was already terminally ill with bone cancer when they began living together. He died in March 1978, at forty-two, after they had filmed The Deer Hunter together. The grief is the unstated weight inside the early performances.

Then the run that built the legend. Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979 won her the first Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, working opposite a Dustin Hoffman whose method tactics — including slapping her unprompted on set, shattering a wine glass against the wall during a scene to startle her on camera, and taunting her with the name of her recently dead fiancé — have aged into a cautionary tale of their own. The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981 paired the contemporary frame with the Victorian, two performances at once. Sophie’s Choice in 1982 made her, definitively, the actress; the Polish accent, the German sentences delivered to an SS officer, the unspeakable choice itself. Pauline Kael, never an admirer, called the technique a magic act, and that has been the central dispute about Streep ever since. Out of Africa in 1985, opposite Robert Redford, was the prestige biopic at full bloom. The decade closed with Silkwood, Heartburn, Ironweed, A Cry in the Dark, Postcards from the Edge — what she has herself half-rued as the accent decade.

The 1990s were rougher, by the standard of what had preceded them. Hollywood had no idea what to do with a serious dramatic actress over forty, and Streep responded by going strange: the cosmetic-horror comedy Death Becomes Her, the whitewater B-movie The River Wild, an underestimated late melodrama with Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County. The second wind came at the turn of the century — Adaptation, The Hours, The Manchurian Candidate, Angels in America — and then, in 2006, the film that reset her commercial register entirely. The Devil Wears Prada was a comedy about a fashion magazine editor that, by her own recent admission, she almost turned down over money and only accepted after the studio doubled her salary. Miranda Priestly is, twenty years on, probably her most-watched performance; the line readings have travelled into ordinary speech in twenty countries. Doubt in 2008 brought her opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in a play adaptation that should not have worked on screen. Mamma Mia! the same year proved she could carry a singing-and-dancing musical to the largest international box office of her career — until the Prada sequel surpassed it. The Iron Lady in 2011, a flawed Margaret Thatcher biopic, gave her the third Oscar that the canonization required as confirmation.

The disagreement about what kind of actress she actually is has never fully resolved. The Kael complaint — that the technique was visible enough to keep audiences outside the part — never went away; it was simply outvoted. The honest answer is that Streep has always been more relaxed in comedy than in her prestige drama, more fluent in the registers of musicals and screwball than in the grief-and-Oscars mode the Academy rewarded her for. The audiences who turned Mamma Mia! and The Devil Wears Prada into cultural durabilities got something the audiences of Sophie’s Choice didn’t quite get: a Streep visibly enjoying herself, working in a register her own canonization had told her she shouldn’t bother with. The third Oscar came for The Iron Lady; the cultural durability has come from Miranda Priestly. The Academy and the audience disagreed about which Streep mattered, and the audience was right.

The personal frame is short on incident, by design. A long marriage to the sculptor Don Gummer, four children — Henry, Mamie, Grace, Louisa — a quiet separation announced in 2017 with no further public elaboration. Since 2024, she and Martin Short, who acted opposite her in Only Murders in the Building, have been a discussed-but-never-formally-confirmed couple, a status both seem comfortable maintaining. She has been a steady public voice on gender pay parity, on environmental policy through the Mothers and Others advocacy group she co-founded in 1989, and against the casting of younger women as foils to older men.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened on May 1, 2026, to the highest opening weekend of her career — outgrossing even Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. The press tour for the sequel has been her most visible season in years; she covered Vogue’s May 2026 issue alongside Anna Wintour, used the platform to call the superhero domination of contemporary cinema “boring,” to defend Stanley Tucci as a national treasure, and to question Melania Trump’s wardrobe choices on national television. She has, again, raised the possibility of returning to Broadway. Whether that happens is the only suspense left in a career the canon long ago considered finished — which, for Streep, is the way the joke continues to land.