Just before the 2017 Academy Awards, Meryl Streep found herself at the center of an unexpected controversy involving one of fashion’s most powerful figures. Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld told Women’s Wear Daily that Streep had initially ordered a couture gown from the house but abandoned it after securing a deal with another designer who would pay her to wear its clothes. He called her a genius actress but added, “Cheapness also now. ”
Streep’s representatives immediately denied the claim, stating that she had never been paid to wear clothing and that accepting such payment would violate her ethics.
Lagerfeld later backed away from the accusation, saying he had misunderstood the situation and regretted the controversy. Chanel confirmed discussions had taken place but said the decision to choose another designer had not been explained as a matter of payment. Streep, however, remained furious, saying the remarks overshadowed her record-breaking 20th Oscar nomination and accusing him of defaming her and her stylist. The incident was only one of several controversies that have marked the later chapter of Streep’s career.
The woman who would go on to hold the record for the most Academy Award nominations of any actor was not always embraced by Hollywood. Born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey, in 1949, she graduated from Vassar College and earned a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama. But her time at Yale was brutally demanding. She described drama school as “like boot camp” and said it was the first time she realized acting had a dark side.
She developed an ulcer under the pressure and was even placed on probation by an acting teacher who believed she was holding herself back. After moving into New York theater, she made her Broadway debut in 1975. It should have been a triumph, but a harsh review from the influential critic John Simon changed the atmosphere around her almost overnight. She later recalled that audiences who had laughed during previews became more restrained after the review appeared, as if they had been told in advance how to feel.
She said the experience was when she began to hate critics. That same year came an even more brutal test. Streep auditioned for Dino De Laurentiis’ remake of “King Kong. ” According to her own account, the producer asked his son in Italian, “Why did you bring me this ugly thing?
” What he apparently did not know was that Streep understood Italian. She answered him in the same language, saying she was sorry she wasn’t beautiful enough to be in the film. The role went to Jessica Lange. Years later, a photo of Streep riding the New York subway circulated online with a caption falsely claiming it showed her returning home from that rejection.
The photo was actually taken in 1981, after she had already won an Oscar. The humiliation itself, however, was real. While her career was still taking shape, Streep experienced a devastating personal loss. In 1976, she met actor John Cazale during a New York production of “Measure for Measure.
” Cazale was 41 and already revered for roles in “The Godfather” and “Dog Day Afternoon. ” Streep was 26 and newly out of Yale. They fell in love quickly and lived together. Then Cazale was diagnosed with cancer.
When Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” was being assembled, Cazale was cast as Stan, which would become his final film role. The studio wanted him replaced after learning how sick he was, but Cimino pushed ahead and arranged for his scenes to be filmed first. Streep joined the production partly to remain close to him. She was watching the man she loved deteriorate while making a film about men destroyed by war.
On March 12, 1978, Cazale died. He was 42, and “The Deer Hunter” had not yet premiered. Streep, only 29, was at his bedside. Cazale’s legacy would prove remarkable despite its brevity.
He appeared in only five feature films, but all of them became historically significant: the first two “Godfather” films, “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Conversation,” and “The Deer Hunter. ” In Streep’s memory, he approached the work obsessively. Al Pacino described him as an acting partner and an older brother. Within weeks of Cazale’s death, Streep’s living situation became unstable when an ex-girlfriend obtained the lease on his apartment.
Through her brother, Streep reconnected with a sculptor named Don Gummer, whom she had met only briefly before. Gummer offered her the use of his apartment while he was away. In September of that same year, only months after Cazale’s death, Streep and Gummer married. Almost immediately, another door opened.
Streep was offered the role of Joanna Kramer in “Kramer vs. Kramer,” the film that would transform her into an Oscar winner. Still grieving, she fought to make Joanna more than a villain, rewriting the crucial courtroom speech to give the character greater complexity. But the set was marked by tension.
During one scene, Dustin Hoffman slapped her across the face without warning, leaving a visible red mark. She still performed the scene, but later described that kind of behavior as overstepping. According to producer Richard Fischoff’s recollections, Hoffman deliberately invoked Cazale’s name and cancer during filming to provoke an emotional reaction from Streep. She went white.
Streep’s rewrite gave Joanna a speech about a woman’s right to have ambitions and a life of her own. Hoffman pushed back, telling her to stop “carrying the flag for feminism” and simply act the scene. Director Robert Benton ultimately accepted her changes. The film, released in 1979, won five major Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actress for Streep.
It was her first Oscar. Her next major role centered on catastrophic loss. In “Sophie’s Choice,” released in 1982, she played a Polish survivor of Auschwitz forced to confront a devastating decision made inside the concentration camp. The role earned her a second Oscar and established a pattern: her greatest early breakthroughs arrived through stories about grief, motherhood, abandonment, guilt, and survival.
Despite her success, some critics questioned whether there was a real human being underneath all the technical precision. Pauline Kael, the influential New Yorker critic, delivered the most memorable attack, arguing that Streep acted “from the neck up. ” The phrase followed her for years. Streep later admitted the criticism “killed” her.
She also recalled that Cazale had once called her a “delicious robot,” meaning that she could execute a performance almost perfectly while keeping her deepest feelings protected from the camera. The accusation became harder to sustain as her filmography expanded. In “Out of Africa,” she played Karen Blixen. In “A Cry in the Dark,” she portrayed Lindy Chamberlain, the Australian mother whose infant daughter disappeared and whose murder conviction became one of Australia’s most notorious miscarriages of justice.
In “Postcards from the Edge,” she played an actress battling addiction and the shadow of her famous mother. Then came “The Bridges of Madison County” in 1995. As Francesca Johnson, an Iowa housewife falling in love with a visiting photographer played by Clint Eastwood, Streep had almost nowhere to hide. There were no extravagant costumes, no historical transformation, no grand speech.
The drama rested on hesitation, the glance held too long, the decision not made. The performance became one of the clearest answers to the “neck up” criticism because its power came from what Francesca could not openly say. Instead of settling into that discovery, Streep kept refusing to become predictable. In “The Devil Wears Prada,” she transformed into Miranda Priestly, a terrifyingly controlled fashion editor.
Then she followed it with “Mamma Mia,” singing and dancing as Donna Sheridan. At 59, she was demonstrating the physical spontaneity Kael had claimed was missing. She later acknowledged she still could not forget what Kael had written. She went on to play Julia Child in “Julie & Julia,” capturing the chef’s distinctive voice and exuberant personality.
Then she went in the opposite direction again. In “The Iron Lady,” she played Margaret Thatcher in two versions: the formidable political leader and the elderly woman looking back on her life. The transformation earned Streep her third Academy Award for Best Actress. But the film itself drew criticism.
Thatcher’s former private secretary Cynthia Crawford called the domestic scenes “absolutely inconceivable,” and Thatcher biographer John Campbell criticized the film’s historical simplification. Conservative politicians objected to the depiction of Thatcher as old, fragile, and cognitively impaired. By that point, Streep had become more than an actress. In January 2017, she accepted the Cecil B.
DeMille Award at the Golden Globes. Instead of recounting her famous roles, she used the stage to confront the political atmosphere surrounding Donald Trump, who was weeks away from becoming president. She never said his name. Instead, she described what she called “one performance” that had stunned her: Trump’s imitation of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition affecting the functioning of his joints.
Streep argued that the moment disturbed her because it was real life, not a movie. She warned that when powerful people publicly humiliate others, that behavior can filter into ordinary life, and she urged her fellow actors to support journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Trump responded quickly. He called her “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood” and a “Hillary flunky,” referring to her support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
By then, Streep had been nominated for the Academy Award more times than any other actor, and she had already won twice before her third victory for “The Iron Lady. ”
The Weinstein scandal brought a different kind of pressure. Streep had worked with Harvey Weinstein on films including “The Iron Lady” and had once jokingly thanked him at the Golden Globes, calling him “God. ” After women began accusing Weinstein of harassment and assault, Streep called his behavior “disgraceful” and “inexcusable” and praised the women who came forward.
But she faced a difficult question: How could she have worked closely with him without knowing what was happening? Streep insisted she had not known about his misconduct, saying that Weinstein had deliberately kept it from her and “made sure I didn’t know. ” No evidence established that she participated in his crimes or deliberately concealed them. Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s accusers, attacked Streep publicly over plans for actresses to wear black at the Golden Globes as a protest.
Then, in December 2017, posters appeared around Los Angeles showing Streep beside Weinstein with a red bar covering her eyes and the words “She knew. ” They appeared near the Screen Actors Guild headquarters, near Streep’s Pasadena home, and around Hollywood locations. The artist responsible eventually acknowledged that he did not actually know whether Streep had known about the misconduct. He said he was retaliating against her for her criticism of Trump.
What the public could not see during Streep’s political confrontation was that her private life had already entered a radically different period. For decades, her marriage to Don Gummer had seemed remarkably stable. They married in 1978 and raised four children: Henry, Mamie, Grace, and Louisa. In her 2012 Oscar acceptance speech, she thanked him before the orchestra could play her off, telling him that everything she valued most in their life had been given to her by him.
In October 2023, that public image changed. A representative for Streep confirmed that she and Gummer had been separated for more than six years and were living apart. The statement contained no accusation, no explanation of a dramatic incident, and no allegation of betrayal. The timing was striking: the separation placed the change around 2017, the same year Streep stood at the Golden Globes and confronted Trump.
There was no courtroom confrontation, no televised accusation campaign, no detailed memoir. They simply maintained separate lives. The actress once humiliated over her appearance became one of Hollywood’s defining performers. The woman who lost John Cazale before her film career fully began built a family and a decades-long marriage.
The performer once criticized as overly technical became celebrated for emotional depth. Even the controversies that surrounded her later years could not change the fact that beneath the headlines, her greatest achievement remained her ability to disappear into other people. Streep continued working well into her 70s, enduring genuine loss, professional humiliation, difficult experiences, public controversy, and profound changes in her private life without disappearing beneath them.
