Meryl Streep

I am so daunted by [reputation] that I never think about it. It is a thing bigger than I am capable of perceiving. Other people are more aware and concerned with it than I could ever allow myself to be.

Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress of theater, film and television.

Quotes

1986–2012

• I am so daunted by [reputation] that I never think about it. It is a thing bigger than I am capable of perceiving. Other people are more aware and concerned with it than I could ever allow myself to be.
  • In: Louis Hobson (1996) "It's so Nice to be nasty," Calgary Sun, December 8, 1996; Cited in: Karen Hollinger The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star, Taylor & Francis, 2006, p. 90, playing down her acting ability.

• I don't know what my image is. I went to France to publicize Marvin's Room, and one really smart young woman journalist said to me "You know, what I told people I was going to interview Meryl Streep, they were so excited...all ze woman in my office, they love you so much. But ze men - they are afraid of you."
  • In: Liz Smith (1998). "The Meryl Streep Nobody Knows." Good Housekeeping, 227(3), September 1998, pp. 94-98; Cited in: Karen Hollinger The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star, Taylor & Francis, 2006, p. 71

"Meryl Streep: Movies, marriage, and turning sixty" (2009)

I live simply. I don't buy a lot of fashion!

James Mottram, "Meryl Streep: Movies, marriage, and turning sixty," The Independent (24 January 2009)

• Hollywood to me is what it is to you. It's something other than what I am. I sit outside it.

• I live simply. I don't buy a lot of fashion!

• Well, aren't we all grateful to be alive? I just know lots of people … at my age, I've lost a lot of people in my life and I'm very grateful to be here. That's what I mean.
  • Her comment when she was to turn 60

• I don't really. In our business, you're not kicked out necessarily …
  • When asked about her retirement.

• No! But they were here [in Los Angeles]. Here they were surprised, because it was difficult to finance, the film. A lot of the executives would say, 'I just don't get it.'
  • Her indignant comments on the runaway success of her musical Mamma Mia!, which grossed a $575m across the globe.

"Meryl Streep's British ancestor 'helped start war with Native Americans" (2012)

Nick Britten, in "Baftas: Meryl Streep's British ancestor 'helped start war with Native Americans'", The Telegraph (14 February 2012)

• Half of me is Streep and the other half is Wilkinson from Lincolnshire so I come by it honestly, this part.

• I am nothing but these people, and as an actor I'm always trying to call up lives and the reason I know these things as an actor is because I have the DNA of all these crazy people.

• I'm so sorry to hear this, but this is what it is. It makes it feels like it's sort of my fault on some level, but it also connect be to those events, those first encounters between the two cultures must have been raw, terrifying, brutal and final. conflicts in early American history, known as King Philip’s War, or Metacom’s War, Lawrence Wilkinson defended his town in the face of fierce violence from the Native Americans.

2024–present

• [On the situation for women in Afghanistan] Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedom than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face, she may chase a squirrel in the park. [...] A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban.
  A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not in public. This is extraordinary. This is a suppression of the natural law.
  The way that this culture, this society has been upended, is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world.
  • Speaking at the United Nations in New York (23 September 2024), as cited in "Cats have more freedom than Afghan women - Meryl Streep", BBC News (24 September 2024)
  • See also Women in Afghanistan.

Misattributed

• I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience.
  • Misattributed to Meryl Streep (and widely disseminated on the Internet as of August/September 2014), this quote is allegedly a translation of a text by the author José Micard Teixeira, the original of which begins (in Portuguese): "Já não tenho paciência para algumas coisas, não porque me tenha tornado arrogante..."

Quotes about Streep

Meryl Streep at the 32nd Grammy Awards in 1990.

In alphabetically by author or source.

• One of my only role models as a young woman was Meryl Streep and, specifically, her character in Out of Africa. I would watch the movie whenever I needed inspiration because Ms. Streep so brilliantly portrayed an incredibly courageous woman who stands alone to save her plantation. Her performance and the strength of her character were tangible examples of how I wanted to be in the world, and I soaked it in and learned from her experience.
  • Gillian Anderson, excerpt from the foreword in Girl Boss: Running the Show Like the Big Chicks (1999)

• Streep, who was born in New Jersey, is known to have historic family ties to Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
  • Nick Britten, in Baftas: Meryl Streep's British ancestor 'helped start war with Native Americans', The Telegraph, 14 February 2012

• Meryl Streep could obviously have made it to the screen on looks alone. The camera embraces her. Lucky camera. Many women would kill for her slender, fashion-model figure, for that ash-blond hair, oval face, porcelain skin and those high, exquisite cheekbones. Her eyes mirror intelligence; their pale blue sparkle demands a new adjective: 'merulean]. Only a slight bump down the plane of her long, patrician nose redeems her profile from perfection.
  • Michael Cimino, in Paul Gray, "Cinema: A Mother Finds Herself," Time, 3 December 1979

• Even [being] in a rehearsal period, with Meryl Streep watching, is a behind-tightening experience.
  • Viola Davis, co-star of her new film, Doubt, in: James Mottram Meryl Streep: Movies, marriage, and turning sixty , The Independent, 24 January 2009.

• Her roots go back to England: We traced her back to her eighth grand-grandfather born in England in 1620. In 1645, he shows up in Providence, Rhode Island, as one of the founding fathers of Rhode Island.
  • Henry Louis Gates Jr., in Henry Louis Gates Says He Broke Meryl Streep's Heart, NBCUniversal Media, 4 February 2010

• Meryl Streep’s image is composed of two distinct image clusters centered on her renown as a great actress and her reputation as a devoted wife and mother. A more muted aspect of her star persona – one that is often masked as merely an offshoot of her maternal devotion –is her social activism.
  • Karen Hollinger, in The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star, Taylor & Francis, 2006,, p. 79

• And at this stage in her seemingly charmed life, when she's moved to Los Angeles and has three children in three different private schools and is redoing a house on the Westside and worrying about fabric samples, she's careered off the beaten path of high drama, if temporarily, to cultivate her comedic connections.
  • Joy Horowitz, in "That Madcap Meryl. Really!," in: nytimes.com, 1991/03/17.
  • When she was nominated for best actress for "Postcards From the Edge"

External links

• Meryl Streep on IMDb