The term dialect (from the Greek word dialektos, Διάλεκτος) is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers.^[1] The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class.^[2] A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect; a regional dialect may be termed a regiolect or topolect. The other usage refers to a language socially subordinate to a regional or national standard language, often historically cognate to the standard, but not a variety of it or in any other sense derived from it^{[citation needed]}. This more precise usage enables distinguishing between varieties of a language, such as the French spoken in Nice, France, and local languages distinct from the superordinate language, e.g. Nissart, the traditional native Romance language of Nice, known in French as Niçard.

A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (phonology, including prosody). Where a distinction can be made only in terms of pronunciation, the term accent is appropriate, not dialect. Other speech varieties include: standard languages, which are standardized for public performance (for example, a written standard); jargons, which are characterized by differences in lexicon (vocabulary); slang; patois; pidgins or argots.

The particular speech patterns used by an individual are termed an idiolect.

Standard and non-standard dialect[link]

A standard dialect (also known as a standardized dialect or "standard language") is a dialect that is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include government recognition or designation; presentation as being the "correct" form of a language in schools; published grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a "correct" spoken and written form; and an extensive formal literature that employs that dialect (prose, poetry, non-fiction, etc.). There may be multiple standard dialects associated with a single language. For example, Standard American English, Standard Canadian English, Standard Indian English, Standard Australian English, and Standard Philippine English may all be said to be standard dialects of the English language.

A nonstandard dialect, like a standard dialect, has a complete vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but is not the beneficiary of institutional support. An example of a nonstandard English dialect is Southern American English or Newfoundland English. The Dialect Test was designed by Joseph Wright to compare different English dialects with each other.

The term dialect is used in two distinct ways.

[edit] "Dialect" or "language"

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect. A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. Some linguists^[3] do not differentiate between languages and dialects, i.e. languages are dialects and vice versa. The distinction is therefore subjective and depends on the user's frame of reference. Note also that the terms are not always treated as mutually exclusive;^{[citation needed]} there is not necessarily anything contradictory in the statement that "the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German". However, the term dialect always implies a relation between languages: if language X is called a dialect, this implies that the speaker considers X a dialect of some other language Y, which then usually is some standard language.

Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:

• if they have no standard or codified form,
• if the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,
• if they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech),
• if they lack prestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.

Anthropological linguists define dialect as the specific form of a language used by a speech community.^{[citation needed]} In other words, the difference between language and dialect is the difference between the abstract or general and the concrete and particular. From this perspective, everyone speaks a dialect. Those who identify a particular dialect as the "standard" or "proper" version of a language are in fact using these terms to express a social distinction. Often, the standard language is close to the sociolect of the elite class.

The status of language is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but it is also the result of a historical and political development. Romansh came to be a written language, and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine dialects. An opposite example is the case of Chinese, whose variations such as Mandarin and Cantonese are often called dialects and not languages, despite their mutual unintelligibility, because the word for them in Mandarin, 方言 fāngyán, was mistranslated as "dialect" because it meant "regional speech"^{[citation needed]}.

See also Mesoamerican languages and Sarkar's criteria on dialects.

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"[link]

The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot ("אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט"‎   "A language is a dialect with an army and navy") in YIVO Bleter 25.1, 1945, p. 13.

Political factors[link]

Modern Nationalism, as developed especially since the French Revolution, has made the distinction between "language" and "dialect" an issue of great political importance. A group speaking a separate "language" is often seen as having a greater claim to being a separate "people", and thus to be more deserving of its own independent state, while a group speaking a "dialect" tends to be seen not as "a people" in its own right, but as a sub-group, part of a bigger people, which must content itself with regional autonomy.^{[citation needed]} The distinction between language and dialect is thus inevitably made at least as much on a political basis as on a linguistic one, and can lead to great political controversy, or even armed conflict.

The classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other varieties of speech can thus be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. English and Serbo-Croatian illustrate the point. English and Serbo-Croatian each have two major variants (British and American English, and Serbian and Croatian, respectively), along with numerous other varieties. For political reasons, analyzing these varieties as "languages" or "dialects" yields inconsistent results: British and American English, spoken by close political and military allies, are almost universally regarded as dialects of a single language, whereas the standard languages of Serbia and Croatia, which differ from each other to a similar extent as the dialects of English, are being treated by some linguists from the region as distinct languages, largely because the two countries oscillate from being brotherly to being bitter enemies. (The Serbo-Croatian language article deals with this topic much more fully.)

Similar examples abound. Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with Bulgarian, certain dialects of Serbian and to a lesser extent the rest of the South Slavic dialect continuum is considered by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, in contrast with the contemporary international view, and the view in the Republic of Macedonia which regards it as a language in its own right. Nevertheless, before the establishment of a literary standard of Macedonian in 1944, in most sources in and out of Bulgaria before the Second World War, the southern Slavonic dialect continuum covering the area of today's Republic of Macedonia were referred to as Bulgarian dialects.

In the 19th Century, the Tsarist Government of Russia claimed that Ukrainian was merely a dialect of Russian and not a language in its own right. Since Soviet times, when Ukrainians were recognised as a separate nationality deserving of its own Soviet Republic, such linguistic-political claims had disappeared from circulation.

In Lebanon, the right-wing Guardians of the Cedars, a fiercely nationalistic (mainly Christian) political party which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating for "Lebanese" to be recognized as a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect, and has even advocated replacing the Arabic alphabet with a revival of the ancient Phoenician alphabet, which lacks a number of characters to write typical Arabic phonemes present in Lebanese, and lost by Phoenician (and Hebrew) in the second millennium BC. This is, however, very much a minority position - in Lebanon itself as in the Arab World as a whole. The varieties of Arabic are considerably different from each other - especially those spoken in North Africa (Maghreb) from those of the Middle East (the Mashriq in the broad definition including Egypt and Sudan) - and had there been the political will in the different Arab countries to cut themselves off from each other, the case could have been made to declare these varieties as separate languages. However, in adherence to the ideas of Arab Nationalism, the Arab countries prefer to give preference to the Literary Arabic which is common to all of them, conduct much of their political, cultural and religious life in it (adherence to Islam), and refrain from declaring each country's specific variety to be a separate language, because Literary Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam and the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Qur'an.

Such moves may even appear at a local, rather than a federal level. The US state of Illinois declared "American" to be the state's official language in 1923,^[4] although linguists and politicians throughout much of the rest of the country considered American simply to be a dialect.

There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately reclassified to serve political purposes. One example is Moldovan. In 1996, the Moldovan parliament, citing fears of "Romanian expansionism," rejected a proposal from President Mircea Snegur to change the name of the language to Romanian, and in 2003 a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary was published, purporting to show that the two countries speak different languages. Linguists of the Romanian Academy reacted by declaring that all the Moldovan words were also Romanian words; while in Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity".

In contrast, the spoken languages of the Han Chinese are usually referred to as dialects of one Chinese language despite their vast differences. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese" for more details.

In the Philippines, the Commission on the Filipino Language declared all the indigenous languages in the Philippines as dialects^{[citation needed]} despite the great differences between them, as well as the existence of significant bodies of literature in each of the major "dialects" and daily newspapers in some.

In 18th and 19th century Germany, several thousand local languages of the continental west Germanic dialect continuum were reclassified as dialects of modern New High German although the vast majority of them were (and still are) mutually incomprehensible, despite the fact that they all existed long before New High German,^[5] which had at least in part been shaped as a compromise or mediative language between these local languages.

To support the intended process of nation building even further, a vague myth of some common Germanic original language developed, and German dialectology began to name dialect groups after presumed and real groups of historic tribes having existed from BC to about 600 AD, from which they were assumed to have descended. Linguistic, historic and archeological evidence for such connections is scarce, meanwhile several such ideas were proven false, yet they lead to several pertaining misnomers in German dialectology. Today, all diverse local languages under the Standard German umbrella are collectively referred to as "German dialects",^[6] the vast majority of German speakers still believe, they were variations of "original" or even Standard German.

The significance of the political factors in any attempt at answering the question "what is a language?" is great enough to cast doubt on whether any strictly linguistic definition, without a socio-cultural approach, is possible. This is illustrated by the frequency with which the army-navy aphorism discussed in the preceding section is cited.

Historical linguistics[link]

Many historical linguists view any speech form as a dialect of the older medium of communication from which it developed.^{[citation needed]} This point of view sees the modern Romance languages as dialects of Latin, modern Greek as a dialect of Ancient Greek, Tok Pisin as a dialect of English, and Scandinavian languages as dialects of Old Norse. This paradigm is not entirely problem-free. It sees genetic relationships as paramount: the "dialects" of a "language" (which itself may be a "dialect" of a yet older tongue) may or may not be mutually intelligible. Moreover, a parent language may spawn several "dialects" which themselves subdivide any number of times, with some "branches" of the tree changing more rapidly than others.

This can give rise to the situation in which two dialects (defined according to this paradigm) with a somewhat distant genetic relationship are mutually more readily comprehensible than more closely related dialects. In one opinion, this pattern is clearly present among the modern Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which neither language shares with French, despite some claiming that both languages are genetically closer to French than to each other:^{[citation needed]} In fact, French-Italian and French-Spanish relative mutual incomprehensibility is due to French having undergone more rapid and more pervasive phonological change than have Spanish and Italian, not to real or imagined distance in genetic relationship. In fact, Italian and French share many more root words in common that do not even appear in Spanish.

For example, the Italian and French words for various foods, some family relationships, and body parts are very similar to each other, yet most of those words are completely different in Spanish. Italian "avere" and "essere" as auxiliaries for forming compound tenses are used similarly to French "avoir" and "être", Spanish only retains "haber" and has done away with "ser" in forming compound tenses, which are no longer used in either Spanish or Portuguese. However, when it comes to phonological structures, Italian and Spanish have undergone less change than French, with the result that some native speakers of Italian and Spanish may attain a degree of mutual comprehension that permits extensive communication.

Interlinguistics[link]

One language, Interlingua, was developed so that the languages of Western civilization would act as its dialects.^[7] Drawing from such concepts as the international scientific vocabulary and Standard Average European, linguists developed a theory that the modern Western languages were actually dialects of a hidden or latent language. Researchers at the International Auxiliary Language Association extracted words and affixes that they considered to be part of Interlingua's vocabulary.^[8] In theory, speakers of the Western languages would understand written or spoken Interlingua immediately, without prior study, since their own languages were its dialects.^[7] This has often turned out to be true, especially, but not solely, for speakers of the Romance languages and educated speakers of English. Interlingua has also been found to assist in the learning of other languages. In one study, Swedish high school students learning Interlingua were able to translate passages from Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian that students of those languages found too difficult to understand.^[9] It should be noted, however, that the vocabulary of Interlingua extends beyond the Western language families.^[8]

Selected list of articles on dialects[link]

• Älvdalsmål
• Bengali dialects
• Catalan dialect examples
• Connacht Irish, Munster Irish, Ulster Irish
• Cypriot Greek, Cypriot Turkish
• Danish dialects
• Dialect of Chalkidiki
• Dialects in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia
• Dialects of the French language
• Dutch dialects
• German dialects
• Gutniska
• Isfahani, Shirazi, Yazdi (Persian dialects)
• Italian dialects
• Jamtlandic
• Japanese dialects
• Korean dialects
• List of Assyrian tribes (dialects)
• List of Chinese dialects
• List of dialects of the English language
• Norwegian dialects
• Portuguese dialects
• Rauma dialect
• Scanian
• Sicilian language
• Slovenian dialects
• Spanish dialects and varieties
• Stockholmska
• Sri Lankan Tamil dialects
• Swedish dialects
• Swedish dialects in Ostrobothnia
• Warsaw dialect
• Yiddish dialects
• Yooper dialect

See also[link]

• Accent
• Creole language
• Dialect levelling
• Dialectometry
• Ethnolect
• Isogloss
• Koiné language
• Literary language
• Regional language
• Sarkar's Linguistic Concepts and Criteria
• Sprachbund

References[link]

1. ^ Oxford English dictionary.
2. ^ Merriam-Webster Online dictionary.
3. ^ Finegan, Edward (2007). Language: Its Structure and Use (5th ed.). Boston, MA, USA: Thomson Wadsworth. p. 348. ISBN 978-1-4130-3055-6. 
4. ^ "American" as the Official Language of the United States.
5. ^ see also: Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache#Change of roles during history
6. ^ including Slavic, Frisian, Dutch, and Danish ones.
7. ^ ^{a b} Morris, Alice Vanderbilt, General report. New York: International Auxiliary Language Association, 1945.
8. ^ ^{a b} Gode, Alexander, Interlingua-English Dictionary. New York: Storm Publishers, 1951.
9. ^ Gopsill, F. P., International languages: A matter for Interlingua. Sheffield: British Interlingua Society, 1990.

External links[link]

• Sounds Familiar? — Listen to regional accents and dialects of the UK on the British Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website
• International Dialects of English Archive Since 1997
• whoohoo.co.uk British Dialect Translator
• thedialectdictionary.com — Compilation of Dialects from around the globe
• A site for announcements and downloading the SEAL System

Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep in Spain, 2008
Born	Mary Louise Streep (1949-06-22) June 22, 1949 (age 63) Summit, New Jersey, U.S.
Alma mater	Vassar College; Yale School of Drama
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1971–present
Spouse	Don Gummer (m. 1978–present; 4 children)
Partner	John Cazale (1975–1978, his death)
Children	4 (including Mamie Gummer and Grace Gummer)

Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949^[1]) is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television, and film. She is widely regarded as one of the most talented actors of all time.^[2][3][4]

Streep made her professional stage debut in The Playboy of Seville (1971), before her screen debut in the television movie Deadliest Season (1977). In that same year, she made her film debut with Julia (1977). Both critical and commercial success came quickly with roles in The Deer Hunter (1978) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), the former giving Streep her first Academy Award nomination and the latter her first win. She later won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in Sophie's Choice (1982) and The Iron Lady (2011).

Streep has received 17 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and 26 Golden Globe nominations, winning eight, more nominations than any other actor in the history of either award. Her work has also earned her two Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Cannes Film Festival award, five New York Film Critics Circle Awards, two BAFTA awards, an Australian Film Institute Award, five Grammy Award nominations, and a Tony Award nomination, amongst others. She was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2009 for her contribution to American culture through performing arts, the youngest actress in each award's history.

Early life and background[link]

Streep was born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey.^[5] Her mother, Mary Wolf (née Wilkinson; 1915-2001), was a commercial artist and former art editor, and her father, Harry William Streep, Jr. (1910-2003), was a pharmaceutical executive.^[6][7][8] She has two brothers, Dana David and Harry William III.^[9] Her patrilineal ancestry originates in Loffenau, Germany, from where her second great-grandfather, Gottfried Streeb, emigrated to the United States, and where one of her ancestors served as mayor. Another line of her father's family was from Giswil in the canton of Obwalden, a small town in Switzerland. Her maternal ancestry originates in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and partly traces back to 17th century immigrants from England.^[8] Her eighth great-grandfather, Lawrence Wilkinson, was one of the first Europeans to settle Rhode Island. Streep is also a distant relative of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and records show that her family were among the first purchasers of land in the state.^[10][11][12]

She was raised a Presbyterian,^[13][14] and grew up in Bernardsville, New Jersey, where she attended Bernards High School.^[15] She had many school friends who were Catholic, and regularly attended Mass because she loved its rituals.^[16] She received her B.A., in Drama at Vassar College in 1971 (where she briefly received instruction from actress Jean Arthur), but also enrolled as an exchange student at Dartmouth College for a quarter before it became coeducational. She subsequently earned an M.F.A. from Yale School of Drama. While at Yale, she played a variety of roles onstage,^[17] from the glamorous Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an eighty-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.^[18][19][20]

Career[link]

Early career[link]

Streep performed in several theater productions in New York and New Jersey after graduating from Yale School of Drama,^[21] including the New York Shakespeare Festival productions of Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew with Raúl Juliá, and Measure for Measure opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale. She started a relationship with Cazale, and was to live with him until his death three years later. She starred on Broadway in the Brecht/Weill musical Happy End, and won an Obie for her performance in the all-sung off-Broadway production of Alice at the Palace.

Streep by Jack Mitchell

Streep began auditioning for film roles, and later recalled an unsuccessful audition for Dino De Laurentiis for the leading female role in King Kong. De Laurentiis commented to his son in Italian, "She's ugly. Why did you bring me this thing?" and was shocked when Streep replied in fluent Italian.^[22] In New York City, she appeared in the 1976 Broadway double bill of Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays. For the former, she received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. Her other early Broadway credits include Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical Happy End in which she originally appeared off-Broadway at the Chelsea Theater Center. She received Drama Desk Award nominations for both productions.

Streep's first feature film was Julia (1977), in which she played a small but pivotal role during a flashback scene. Streep was living in New York City with Cazale, who had been diagnosed with bone cancer.^[23] He was cast in The Deer Hunter (1978), and Streep was delighted to secure a small role because it allowed her to remain with Cazale for the duration of filming. She was not specifically interested in the part, commenting, "They needed a girl between the two guys and I was it."^[24]

She played a leading role in the television miniseries Holocaust (1978) as a German woman married to a Jewish artist in Nazi era Germany. She later explained that she had considered the material to be "unrelentingly noble",^[24] and had taken the role only because she had needed money.^[25] 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. She spoke of her grief and her hope that work would provide a diversion; she accepted a role in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) with Alan Alda, later commenting that she played it on "automatic pilot",^[24] and performed the role of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park.^[26] With an estimated audience of 109 million, Holocaust brought a degree of public recognition to Streep, who was described in August 1978 as "on the verge of national visibility".^[25] She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or a Movie^[27] for her performance.

The Deer Hunter (1978) was released a month later, and Streep was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

Streep played a supporting role in Manhattan (1979) for Woody Allen, later stating that she had not seen a complete script and was given only the six pages of her own scenes,^[28] and that she had not been permitted to improvise a word of her dialogue.^[29] Asked to comment on the script for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in a meeting with the producer Stan Jaffee, director Robert Benton and star Dustin Hoffman, Streep insisted that the female character was not representative of many real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles, and was written as "too evil".^[24] Jaffee, Benton and Hoffman agreed with Streep, and the script was revised.^[24] In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a mother and housewife with a career,^[30] and frequented the Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set.^[24] Benton allowed Streep to write her dialogue in two of her key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman.^[31] Jaffee and Hoffman later spoke of Streep's tirelessness, with Hoffman commenting, "She's extraordinarily hardworking, to the extent that she's obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else but what she's doing."^[32]

Streep drew critical acclaim for her performance in each of her three films released in 1979: the romantic comedy Manhattan, the political drama The Seduction of Joe Tynan and the family drama, Kramer vs. Kramer.^[21] She was awarded the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress, National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress and National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress for her collective work in the three films. Among the awards won for Kramer vs. Kramer were the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.^[21]

1980s[link]

Streep at the 61st Academy Awards, 1989

After prominent supporting roles in two of the 1970s' most successful films, the consecutive winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Deer Hunter and Kramer vs. Kramer, and praise for her versatility in several supporting roles, Streep progressed to leading roles. Her first was The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981). A story within a story drama, the film paired Streep with Jeremy Irons as contemporary actors, telling their modern story as well as the Victorian era drama they were performing. 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.^[33] Streep was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work.

Her next film, the psychological thriller, Still of the Night (1982) reunited her with Robert Benton, the director of Kramer vs. Kramer, and co-starred 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".^[34]

As the Polish holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice (1982), Streep's emotional dramatic performance and her apparent mastery of a Polish accent drew praise.^[21] William Styron wrote the novel with Ursula Andress in mind for the part of Sophie, but Streep was very determined to get the role. After she obtained a pirated copy of the script, she went to Alan J. Pakula and threw herself on the ground begging him to give her the part. Streep filmed the "choice" scene in one take and refused to do it again, as she found shooting the scene extremely painful and emotionally exhausting.^[35] Among several notable acting awards, Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. Roger Ebert said of her performance, "Streep plays the Brooklyn scenes with an enchanting Polish-American accent (she has the first accent I've ever wanted to hug), and she plays the flashbacks in subtitled German and Polish. There is hardly an emotion that Streep doesn't touch in this movie, and yet we're never aware of her straining. This is one of the most astonishing and yet one of the most unaffected and natural performances I can imagine."

She followed this success with a biographical film, Silkwood (1983), in which she played her first real-life character, the union activist Karen Silkwood. She discussed her preparation for the role in an interview with Roger Ebert and said that she had met with people close to Silkwood to learn more about her, and in doing so realized that each person saw a different aspect of Silkwood.^[36] Streep concentrated on the events of Silkwood's life and concluded, "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."^[36]

Her next films were a romantic drama, Falling in Love (1984) opposite Robert De Niro, and a British drama, Plenty (1985). Roger Ebert said of Streep's performance in Plenty that she conveyed "great subtlety; it is hard to play an unbalanced, neurotic, self-destructive woman, and do it with such gentleness and charm... Streep creates a whole character around a woman who could have simply been a catalogue of symptoms."^[37]

Out of Africa (1985) starred Streep as the Danish writer Karen Blixen and co-starred Robert Redford. A significant critical success, the film received a 63% "fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes.^[38] Streep co-starred with Jack Nicholson in her next two films, the dramas Heartburn (1986) and Ironweed (1987), in which she sang onscreen for the first time since the television movie, Secret Service, in 1977. In A Cry in the Dark (1988), she played the biographical role of Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman who had been convicted of the murder of her infant daughter in which Chamberlain claimed her baby had been taken by a dingo. Filmed in Australia, Streep won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, a Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and was nominated for several other awards for her portrayal of Chamberlain.

In She-Devil (1989), Streep played her first comedic film role, opposite Roseanne Barr. Richard Corliss, writing for Time, commented that Streep was the "one reason" to see the film and observed that it marked a departure from the type of role for which she had been known, saying, "Surprise! Inside the Greer Garson roles Streep usually plays, a vixenish Carole Lombard is screaming to be cut loose."^[39]

1990s[link]

From 1984 to 1990, Streep won six People's Choice Awards for Favorite Motion Picture Actress and, in 1990, was named World Favorite.

In the 1990s, Streep continued to choose a great variety of roles, including a drug-addicted movie actress in a screen adaptation of Carrie Fisher's novel Postcards from the Edge, with Dennis Quaid and Shirley MacLaine. Streep and Goldie Hawn had established a friendship and were interested in making a film together. After considering various projects, they decided upon Thelma and Louise, until Streep's pregnancy coincided with the filming schedule, and the producers decided to proceed with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis.^[22] They subsequently filmed the farcical black comedy, Death Becomes Her, with Bruce Willis as their co-star. Time's Richard Corliss wrote approvingly of Streep's "wicked-witch routine" but dismissed the film as "She-Devil with a make-over".^[40]

Biographer Karen Hollinger describes this period as a downturn in the popularity of Streep's films, which reached its nadir with the failure of Death Becomes Her, attributing this partly to a critical perception that her comedies had been an attempt to convey a lighter image following several serious but commercially unsuccessful dramas, and more significantly to the lack of options available to an actress in her forties.^{[41][clarification needed]} Streep commented that she had limited her options by her preference to work in Los Angeles, close to her family,^[41] a situation that she had anticipated in a 1981 interview when she commented, "By the time an actress hits her mid-forties, no one's interested in her anymore. And if you want to fit a couple of babies into that schedule as well, you've got to pick your parts with great care."^[33]

In 1995, Streep played opposte Clint Eastwood in the love story The Bridges of Madison County (1995). Based on a best-selling novel by Robert James Waller,^[42] it relates the story of Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), a photographer working for National Geographic, who has a love affair with a middle-aged Italian farm wife in Iowa named Francesca (Streep). Streep and Eastwood got along famously during production and such was their on-screen chemistry that a number of people believed that the two were having an affair off-camera, although this was denied by both.^[43] The film was a hit at the box office and grossed $70 million in the United States.^[44] The film, unlike the novel, surprised film critics and was warmly received. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Clint had managed to create "a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill", while Joe Morgenstern of the The Wall Street Journal described The Bridges of Madison County as "one of the most pleasurable films in recent memory".^[44]

In 1999, Streep portrayed Roberta Guaspari, a real-life New Yorker who found passion and enlightenment teaching violin to inner-city kids in East Harlem, in the music drama Music of the Heart. A departure from director Wes Craven’s previous work on films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream series, Streep replaced singer Madonna who left the project before filming began due to creative differences with Craven. Required to perform on the violin, Streep went through two months of intense training, four to six hours a day.^[45]

In addition, Streep appeared with Glenn Close in the movie version of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits; The River Wild; Marvin's Room (with Diane Keaton and Leonardo DiCaprio); and One True Thing.

2000s[link]

Streep entered the 2000s with Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a science fiction film about a child-like android, played by Haley Joel Osment, uniquely programmed with the ability to love, voicing the Blue Fairy.^[46] The same year, Streep co-hosted the annual Nobel Peace Prize Concert concert with Liam Neeson which was held in Oslo, Norway on December 11, 2001 in honour of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the United Nations and Kofi Annan.^[47]

In 2002, Streep returned to the stage for the first time in more than twenty years, playing Arkadina in The Public Theater's revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.^[48] The same year, she began work on Spike Jonze's comedy-drama Adaptation (2002), in which she portrayed real-life journalist Susan Orlean. Lauded by critics and viewers alike,^[49] the film won Streep her fourth Golden Globe in the Best Supporting Actress category.^[50] Also in 2002, Streep appeared alongside Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, based on the 1999 novel by Michael Cunningham. Focusing on three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, the film was generally well received and won all three leading actresses a Silver Bear for Best Actress the following year.^[50]

Streep in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2004.

The following year, Streep had a cameo as herself in the Farrelly brothers comedy Stuck on You (2003) and reunited with Mike Nichols to star with Al Pacino and Emma Thompson in the HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner's six-hour play Angels in America, the story of two couples whose relationships dissolve amidst the backdrop of Reagan Era politics. Streep, who was cast in four roles in the mini-series, received her second Emmy Award and fifth Golden Globe for her performance.^[50] In 2004, Streep was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award by the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute,^[50]. She appeared in Jonathan Demme's moderately successful remake of The Manchurian Candidate,^[51] co-starring Denzel Washington, playing the role of a woman who is both a U.S. senator and the manipulative, ruthless mother of a vice-presidential candidate.^[52] The same year, she played the supporting role of Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events alongside Jim Carrey, based on the first three novels in Snicket's book series. The black comedy received generally favorable reviews from critics,^[53] and won the Academy Award for Best Makeup.^[54]

Streep was next cast in the 2005 comedy Prime, directed by Ben Younger. In the film, she played Lisa Metzger, the Jewish psychoanalyst of a divorced and lonesome business-woman, played by Uma Thurman, who enters a relationship with Metzger's 23-year-old son (Bryan Greenberg). A modest mainstream success, it eventually grossed US$67.9 million internationally.^[55] In August and September 2006, she starred onstage at The Public Theater's production of Mother Courage and Her Children at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.^[56] The Public Theater production was a new translation by playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), with songs in the Weill/Brecht style written by composer Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change); veteran director George C. Wolfe was at the helm. Streep starred alongside Kevin Kline and Austin Pendleton in this three-and-a-half-hour play in which she sang and appeared in almost every scene.

Also in 2006, Streep, along with Lily Tomlin, portrayed the last two members of what was once a popular family country music act in Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion. A comedic ensemble piece featuring Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline and Woody Harrelson, the film revolves around the behind-the-scenes activities at the long-running public radio show of the same name. The film grossed over US$26 million, the majority of which came from domestic markets.^[57] Commercially, Streep fared better with a role in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), a loose screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel of the same name. Streep portrayed the powerful and demanding Miranda Priestly, fashion magazine editor (and boss of a recent college graduate played by Anne Hathaway), and her performance drew rave reviews from critics and earned her many award nominations, including her record-setting 14th Oscar bid, as well as another Golden Globe. Upon its commercial release, the film became Streep's biggest commercial success yet, grossing more than US$326.5 million worldwide.^[58]

In 2007, Streep was cast in four films. She portrayed a wealthy university patron in Chen Shi-zheng's much-delayed feature drama Dark Matter (2007), a film about a Chinese science graduate student who becomes violent after dealing with academic politics at a U.S. university. Inspired by the events of the 1991 University of Iowa shooting,^[59] and initially scheduled for a 2007 release, producers and investors decided to shelve Dark Matter out of respect for the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007.^[60] The drama received negative to mixed reviews upon its limited 2008 release.^[61] Streep played a U.S. government official who investigates an Egyptian foreign national suspected of terrorism in the political thriller Rendition (2007), directed by Gavin Hood.^[62] Keen to get involved in a thriller film, Streep welcomed the opportunity to star in a film genre for which she was not usually offered scripts and immediately signed on to the project.^[63] Upon its release, Rendition was less commercially successful,^[64] and received mixed reviews.^[65]

Also in 2007, Streep had a short role alongside Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close and her eldest daughter Mamie Gummer in Lajos Koltai's drama film Evening, based on the 1998 novel of the same name by Susan Minot. Switching between the present and the past, it tells the story of a bedridden woman, who remembers her tumultuous life in the mid-1950s.^[66] The film was released to lukewarm reactions by critics, who called it "beautifully filmed, but decidedly dull [and] a colossal waste of a talented cast."^[67][68] Streep's last film of 2007 was Robert Redfords Lions for Lambs, a film about the connection between a platoon of United States soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. senator, a reporter, and a California college professor.

Streep with her fellow cast and all four members of ABBA at the Swedish premiere of Mamma Mia! in July 2008.

In 2008, Streep found major commercial success when she starred in Phyllida Lloyd's Mamma Mia!, a film adaptation of the musical of the same name, based on the songs of Swedish pop group ABBA. Co-starring Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård and Colin Firth, Streep played a single mother and a former backing singer, whose daughter (Seyfried), a bride-to-be who never met her father, invites three likely paternal candidates to her wedding on an idyllic Greek island.^[69] An instant box office success, Mamma Mia! became Streep's highest-grossing film to date, with box office receipts of US$602.6 million,^[70] also ranking it first among the highest-grossing musical films of all-time.^[71] Nominated for another Golden Globe, Streep's performance was generally well received by critics, with Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe commenting "the greatest actor in American movies has finally become a movie star."^[72] Streep's other film of 2008 was Doubt featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis. A drama revolving around the stern principal nun (Streep) of a Bronx Catholic school in 1964 who brings charges of pedophilia against a popular priest (Hoffman), the film became a moderate box office success,^[73] but was hailed by many critics as one of the best of 2008.^[74] The film received five Academy Awards nominations, for its four lead actors and for Shanley's script.^[50]

In 2009, Streep played chef Julia Child in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, co-starring Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci. The first major motion picture based on a blog, it contrasts the life of Child in the early years of her culinary career with the life of young New Yorker Julie Powell (Adams), who aspires to cook all 524 recipes in Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days, a challenge she described on her popular blog, The Julie/Julia Project, that would make her a published author. The same year, Streep also starred in Nancy Meyers' romantic comedy It's Complicated, with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. She also received nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for both of these films and won the award for the former.^[75] Streep later received her 16th Oscar nomination for Julie & Julia.^[76] She also lent her voice to Mrs. Felicity Fox in the stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox.

2010s[link]

Streep's first film of the 2010s was Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady (2011), a British biographical film about Margaret Thatcher, which takes a look at the Prime Minister during the Falklands War and her years in retirement.^[77] Streep, who sat through a session at the House of Commons to observe British MPs in action in preparation for her role,^[78] called her cast "a daunting and exciting challenge," and further added: "I am trying to approach the role with as much zeal, fervour and attention to detail as the real Lady Thatcher possesses – I can only hope my stamina will begin to approach her own."^[79] While the film met with mixed critics, Streep's performance got rave reviews, earning her Best Actress awards at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs as well as a third statuette at the Academy Awards.^[80][81][82]

In July 2010, it was announced that Streep will star in an upcoming comedy entitled Mommy & Me alongside Tina Fey who will play her daughter. The film is being directed by Stanley Tucci.^[83]

Accents and dialects[link]

Streep is well known for her ability to imitate foreign and domestic accents,^[21] from Danish in Out of Africa (1985); to British RP in Plenty (also 1985), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and The Iron Lady (2011); and from Italian in The Bridges of Madison County (1995); to a Minnesota accent in A Prairie Home Companion (2006). In A Cry in the Dark (1988), critics were impressed with Streep's ability to master an Australian accent with shades of New Zealand English.^[84] For her role in the film Sophie's Choice (1982), she took language courses to speak both English and German with a Polish accent. In The Iron Lady, she reproduced the vocal style of Margaret Thatcher, from the time before she became Britain's Prime Minister, and after she had taken elocution lessons to change her pitch, pronunciation and delivery. Despite the accolades accorded to her, Streep has emphasised that adopting accents is an element she simply considers an obvious part of creating a character. When asked whether accents helped her get into character, she responded, "I'm always baffled by this question... How could I play that part and talk like me?" When questioned as to how she reproduces different accents, Streep replied, "I listen."^[85]

Music[link]

After Streep appeared in Mamma Mia!, her rendition of the song "Mamma Mia" rose to popularity in the Portuguese music charts, where it peaked at #8 in October 2008.^[86]

At the 35th People's Choice Awards, her version of Mamma Mia won an award for "Favorite Song From A Soundtrack".^[87] In 2008, Streep was nominated for a Grammy Award (her fifth nomination) for her work on the Mamma Mia! soundtrack.

Philanthropy[link]

Streep is the spokesperson for the National Women's History Museum, to which she has donated a significant amount of money (including her fee for The Iron Lady) and hosted numerous events. ^[88]

Personal life[link]

Streep lived with actor John Cazale for three years until his death in March 1978.^[89][90] Streep married sculptor Don Gummer on September 15, 1978.^[91] They have four children: Henry "Hank" Wolfe Gummer (born November 13, 1979), Mary Willa "Mamie" Gummer (born August 3, 1983), Grace Jane Gummer (born May 9, 1986), and Louisa Jacobson Gummer (born June 12, 1991). Both Mamie and Grace are actresses.^[6] Hank is a musician who performs under the name Henry Wolfe.^[92]

When asked if religion plays a part in her life, in an interview in 2009, Streep replied, "I follow no doctrine. I don't belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram."^[93] Streep does not rule out the possibility that God exists, “I do have a sense of trying to make things better. Where does that come from?”^[94]

Awards and nominations[link]

Streep receiving her honorary degree from Harvard University on May 27, 2010

In 1999, Streep was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film.^[95] Streep holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations of any actor, having been nominated 17 times since her first nomination in 1979 for her performance in The Deer Hunter (fourteen for Best Actress and three for Best Supporting Actress) – five more than both Katharine Hepburn and Jack Nicholson, who are tied in second place.^[96] With her third Oscar win for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011) in 2012, Streep became the fifth performer to receive three Academy Awards: Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman and Walter Brennan all earned three, while Hepburn won four.^[97]

In 2009, Streep became the most-nominated performer in Golden Globe Awards history when her double lead actress nods for Doubt (2008) and Mamma Mia! (2008) gave her 23 in total, breaking the tie with Jack Lemmon, who had received 22 lead nominations before his death in 2001.^[98] The following year, Streep surpassed Jack Nicholson and Angela Lansbury, with six Golden Globe awards wins each, after receiving her seventh Globe for her performance as Julia Child in Julie & Julia (2009).^[98] In 2012, she broke her own record when she garnered her 26th nomination and overall eighth win for The Iron Lady at the 69th Golden Globe Awards.

As with both the Oscars and the Golden Globe Awards, Streep holds the BAFTA record for most nominations at 14 in total.^[99] She received her second Best Actress award for The Iron Lady at the 65th ceremony in February 2012, following her first win in 1981 for her performance in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).^[99]

In 1983, Yale University, from which Streep graduated in 1975,^[100] was the first university to award her an honorary degree, a Doctorate of Fine Arts.^[101] In 1998, Women in Film awarded Streep with the Crystal Award, an honor for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.^[102] The same year, Streep received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2003, Streep was awarded an honorary César Award by the French Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma. In 2004, at the Moscow International Film Festival, Streep was honored with the Stanislavsky Award for the outstanding achievement in the career of acting and devotion to the principles of Stanislavsky's school. Also in 2004, Streep received the AFI Life Achievement Award. In 2008, Streep was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.^[103] In 2009, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by Princeton University.^[104] In 2010, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree by Harvard University.^[105][106]

On December 4, 2011 (program aired on CBS-TV on December 27, 2011), Streep received the 2011 Kennedy Center Honor (along with Neil Diamond, Yo-Yo Ma, Sonny Rollins, and Barbara Cook). On February 14, 2012, Streep received the Honorary Golden Bear at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival.^[107] She previously won the Berlinale Camera at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival in 1999.^[108]

Selected filmography[link]

See also[link]

	Biography portal
	Film portal
	Theatre portal
	Television portal

• List of people from New Jersey
• List of American actresses
• List of actors with two or more Academy Awards in acting categories

References[link]