“That was not an unrealistic expectation”: the moment Meryl Streep thought her career was over
Meryl Streep is, without question, one of the most celebrated actors of her generation. She’s been nominated for an unprecedented 21 Academy Awards across four decades, won three of them, and been nominated for six Emmy Awards across nearly five decades. She’s played such a wide range of roles that it would be a fool’s errand to try to encapsulate them all. From a nuclear whistleblower to a cutthroat fashion magazine editor, she has shown time and again that she can disappear into just about any character and probably get an Oscar for it.
It can be easy to take Streep’s longevity for granted. It’s hard to imagine an awards season or a fall release schedule without her. But taking even the slightest step back, the scale of her achievements come into sharp focus. In an industry that is notoriously inhospitable for women over a certain age, she is an outlier. Few other female actors have been as consistently in-demand as she has been from her early 30s through to her 70s. If anything, her fame and the respect of the industry have only grown with time, and she continues to land meaty roles in big productions in a way that, sadly, few women her age do.
Early in her career, Streep was all too aware of the usual trajectory for female actors. In fact, she was so aware of it that she was convinced it would be her fate as well. While accepting an honorary award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the 74-year-old actor remembered the moment when she was convinced that she had aged out of Hollywood.
“Thirty-five years ago when I was here for the first time, I was already a mother of three. I was about to turn 40 and I thought that my career was over,” Streep remembered. “And that was not an unrealistic expectation for actresses at that time. I’m just so grateful that you haven’t gotten sick of my face, that you haven’t gotten off of the train.”
In 1989, Streep won the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance in the 1988 courtroom drama Evil Angels (also known as A Cry in the Dark). Aside from being a mother of three and about to turn 40, she had also won two Academy Awards and been nominated for six others. In fact, with only a decade in the industry, she had accomplished far more than most actors dream of.
Luckily, despite her fears, her career was just getting started. Just two years after accepting her award, she had already received another Oscar nomination and starred in another three movies. Her most iconic roles, including in The Devil Wears Prada, Julie & Julia, and Mamma Mia! were still many years away, and several generations of filmgoers who would come to revere her had not even been born.
At 39, Streep had every reason to believe that her career was about to hit a wall, but, thankfully for all of us, it did the opposite, and she is now the benchmark that all female actors can aspire to.
