Meryl Streep has spent nearly five decades as Hollywood’s most celebrated actress, a figure whose technical mastery and guarded private life earned her a reputation as the industry’s “ice queen. ” Now at 76, she has chosen to open up about one of the most meaningful relationships of her career: her bond with Robert Redford, forged during the 1985 filming of Out of Africa and protected by what she describes as decades of mutual silence. Born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey, in 1949, Streep was raised by a mother who instilled in her a belief that she could accomplish anything she set her mind to. As a teenager, she was a cheerleader and homecoming queen, but her early artistic ambitions were private.
She took opera lessons from age 12 but quit after four years, realizing she was performing music she did not emotionally connect with. She decided then that her art would be rooted in honesty. Her path to stardom was demanding. At the Yale School of Drama, Streep worked as a waitress and typist to afford tuition while appearing in dozens of plays a year, pushing herself to the point of developing ulcers.
She nearly left acting to attend law school, but the stage pulled her back. In 1975, she moved to New York and quickly encountered Hollywood’s harsh focus on appearance. During an audition for King Kong, producer Dino De Laurentiis commented in Italian to his son that she was ugly and asked why she had been brought in. Streep, fluent in Italian, responded in kind: “I’m sorry I’m not as beautiful as I should be, but this is what you get.
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Her early career was shaped by profound personal tragedy. In 1976, she began a relationship with actor John Cazale, and the two remained inseparable until his death. When Cazale was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, Streep took a supporting role in The Deer Hunter specifically to stay by his side during filming. She also accepted work in the miniseries Holocaust to cover his mounting medical bills.
She won an Emmy for that performance, but the achievement meant little to her; the man she loved was gone. By 1979, Streep was being hailed as a technical marvel, though her intensity on set was equally notable. During Kramer vs. Kramer, she clashed sharply with co-star Dustin Hoffman, who reportedly slapped her during a scene to provoke a reaction.
Streep refused to break. She demanded the script be rewritten, declining to play the one-dimensional “evil wife” the writers had created and insisting the character be given understandable motivations. She won her first Oscar for the role and, in a now-famous gesture, left the statuette on a toilet in the ladies’ room after her speech. Over the following decade, Streep solidified her status as a singular force.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, she navigated the complexities of a Victorian drama while playing a modern actress, perfecting an English accent that convinced locals she was native. Despite her success, she later admitted to wishing she were more beautiful. Her breakthrough to the highest level of her craft came in 1982 with Sophie’s Choice, in which she played an Auschwitz survivor. To prepare, she mastered Polish and German.
The film’s central scene, in which her character is forced to choose which of her children will live, was filmed only once; Streep refused to do it again, saying the emotional toll was too great. Roger Ebert called it the most unaffected and natural performance he could imagine. She won the Oscar. In 1983, she took on the role of Karen Silkwood, the nuclear whistleblower who died in a suspicious car crash.
Streep sought every available piece of information about Silkwood, aiming to portray a human being rather than a myth. The film was a quiet success that demonstrated her ability to carry the weight of a real person’s story. Then came Out of Africa. Director Sydney Pollack was initially skeptical, doubting Streep was glamorous enough for the role of Karen Blixen and even considering Jane Seymour.
But Streep’s audition dismantled his concerns. Filming took 101 days in Kenya, and it was there that Streep and Robert Redford developed what she now describes as an unspoken understanding. Redford, she said, was the first leading man who did not try to outshine her; he simply believed in her. The film’s celebrated hair-washing scene became, for Streep, the pinnacle of that bond.
Out of Africa won Best Picture, and Streep earned another Oscar nomination. By the early 1990s, Streep was confronting Hollywood’s double standard for aging actresses. As she approached 40, she watched scripts grow thinner and became acutely aware that the industry treated even the most talented women as depreciating assets. In 1990, she publicly criticized the Screen Actors Guild for the industry’s failure to value women both on screen and in pay.
She attempted a pivot toward lighter material with films like Postcards from the Edge and Death Becomes Her, but she disliked the latter’s heavy reliance on special effects and cosmetics, which she said made her feel disconnected from the work. In 1995, Clint Eastwood cast her in The Bridges of Madison County. Streep admitted she did not care for the novel, but she saw in the role an opportunity to speak for women the industry had written off. She gained weight to capture a more voluptuous presence and turned the sentimental story into a critically acclaimed success that grossed $70 million.
She spent the rest of the decade shedding her reputation for cold technicality. In One True Thing, she played a mother dying of cancer with a raw honesty that silenced critics who had previously called her distant. In 1999, she earned Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Music of the Heart. The 2000s brought a new phase.
Streep returned to the stage in The Seagull and took on four roles in the HBO epic Angels in America, collecting Emmys and Golden Globes along the way. In 2006, she became a global cultural phenomenon as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, turning a demanding fashion editor into an iconic portrait of power. The role marked her record-setting 14th Oscar nomination and proved she could command blockbuster audiences as easily as she changed accents. In 2007, she reunited with Redford on the set of Lions for Lambs.
Critics were lukewarm about the film, but for Streep, it was a return to the connection they had forged in Kenya two decades earlier. While some reviewers found Redford’s performance strained, Streep was praised as natural and quietly powerful. The following year, she traded designer suits for denim overalls in Mamma Mia! , earning $600 million worldwide.
As one critic noted, the greatest actor in American movies had finally become a movie star. She followed that with a chilling turn as Sister Aloysius in Doubt, a performance so severe she was called the scariest nun in film history. In 2011, Streep took on Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, spending hours studying the former prime minister’s voice and mannerisms. The film divided British audiences, but Streep’s performance was widely celebrated, earning her a third Oscar.
She continued through a remarkable range of roles, from Julia Child in Julie & Julia to a grieving matriarch in August: Osage County, and in 2017, she played Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in Steven Spielberg’s The Post. In 2019, Streep moved to television, joining Big Little Lies as a passive-aggressive grandmother. For the first time in her five-decade career, she accepted the role without reading a script, trusting the material based on reputation alone. Streep has long guarded her personal life.
For over 45 years, she and sculptor Don Gummer represented stability in an industry known for fleeting marriages. They raised four children—Henry Wolfe, Mamie Gummer, Grace Gummer, and Louisa Jacobson—each of whom has pursued their own artistic path. In 2023, it became public that Streep and Gummer had been living separately for more than six years. There was no scandal, just a quiet transition into a new chapter.
Streep’s recent work includes a role in Only Murders in the Building, earning her another string of nominations. She is also set to reprise Miranda Priestly in a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada and has signed on to portray musician Joni Mitchell in an upcoming biopic. Her career records are unmatched: 21 Academy Award nominations and 32 Golden Globe nods, along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the AFI Life Achievement Award. President Barack Obama once said she “represents the full range of the human experience.
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Now, Streep has decided to speak more openly about her bond with Redford, who died in 2024. “Bob was the kind of person who made everyone around him better,” she shared. She described him as a man of rare dignity and quiet intelligence, someone who saw past the surface of stardom. “We had this unspoken understanding on set,” she recalled.
“It wasn’t about the scripts or the accolades, it was about the love of the craft itself. ”
She spoke of hours spent in the tall grass of Kenya discussing character motivations and the nature of truth rather than lines or scenes. She credited Redford with teaching her that success is measured not by box office figures but by integrity. She described feeling a profound sense of safety near him and remembered watching him build the Sundance Institute as a gift to younger filmmakers rather than a monument to himself.
Reflecting on their connection, she said he was more than a partner: “He was the anchor I didn’t know I needed. ” The bond, she suggests, was intense enough that it required a long silence to protect it. Now, in her later years, she has chosen to give voice to that chapter of her life—not as a revelation of romance, but as a tribute to a standard of artistic partnership and personal character she has carried with her ever since.
