John Bankston - Meryl Streep: Actress

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Meryl Streep wasn't sure about acting. She loved performing in school plays. She'd even joked with a boyfriend about someday being rich and famous. Yet in her early 20s she worried it was a poor career choice. It's very hard to become a professional actor. Most working actors don't earn much money, Plus, Streep thought the work was too fake, too fantastic.

"Acting is a stupid way to make a living," she admitted thinking at the time, remembering on Inside the Actors Studio that she worried, "It doesn't do anything in the world."

Instead, Streep wanted to go to law school. Unfortunately, she overslept the morning of her admissions test. She took it as a sign. Over a decade later, she told playwright Wendy Wasserstein in an interview, "I'm doing the only thing I can, I think."

Instead of law school, Streep enrolled at a top acting programattending The Yale School of Drama at the same time as Wasserstein. Streep starred in numerous school productions. The program also led to professional acting jobs, paving the way for a career where she became famous for disappearingseeming to become the characters she portrayed.

Her talent for transformation was revealed in high school. It didn't happen on stage. It happened when she set her sights on becoming popular.

As a middle-schooler, Streep blended in. She remembers having few friends. "She had scraggly short hair, cat-eye glasses that made her look like a middle-aged secretary," Streep biographer Michael Schulman told NPR's Morning Edition. "She was completely unconcerned with how she looked and being liked."

That changed over the summer before her freshman year. She decided she wanted to become the sort of girl boys liked. "I worked harder on this characterization really than anyone I think I've ever done since," she admitted during a 2010 commencement speech at Barnard College. "I studied the character I imagined I wanted to be that of the generically pretty high school girl. I researched her deeply, that is to say shallowly, in Vogue, in Seventeen, and in Mademoiselle magazines. I tried to imitate her hair, her lipstick, her lashes, the clothes of the lithesome, beautiful and generically appealing high school girls that I saw in those pages. I ate an apple a day, period. I peroxided my hair, ironed it straight. I demanded brand name clothes...I worked on my giggle."

She did more than work on her giggle. She saw herself as opinionated, even bossy. In the early 1960s, there didn't seem to be many boys interested in a girl like that. They wanted a girlfriend who was agreeable. They wanted a girlfriend who laughed at their jokes.

Photo of Meryl Streep as a cheerleader from the 1966 Bernards High School yearbook. This was in her junior year of high school.

Source: 1966 Bernards High School yearbook

Streep noted in her speech at Barnard that she didn't just change her appearance. She changed her attitude. Streep undertook what actors call an "interior adjustment." She "cultivated softness, agreeableness, a breezy, natural sort of sweetness, even shyness if you will, which was very, very, very effective on the boys. But the girls didn't buy it"

Before her first year at Bernards High School in Bernardsville, New Jersey was over, she'd achieved her goals. She was on the cheerleading squad. She was popular. She even had a steady boyfriend. Mike Booth was a sophomore when he began dating Streep. "Her eyes were extremely bright," he remembered in the biography Her Again. "Her smile was genuine. She didn't smirk or run with a pack like a lot of girls. Yet there was a slight awkwardness about her, as though she was certain that her dress didn't look right, or her shoes didn't fit, or she was just plain ugly."

By her senior year the awkwardness had disappeared. Streep was dating a star football player. And in 1966, she was crowned Homecoming Queen. The honor "was kind of the pinnacle." Schulman told NPR. "It was kind of like winning best actress of her high school." Streep did more than earn a tiara decorated with fake diamonds along with a description in the school's yearbook as a "pretty blonde ... vivacious cheerleader ...[with] many talents ... Where the boys are." By then, she believed her persona.

Photo of Meryl Streep as vice-president of the chorus from the 1966 Bernards High School yearbook.

Source: 1966 Bernards High School yearbook

"I had actually convinced myself that I was this person and she, me, pretty, talented, but not stuck-up. You know, a girl who laughed a lot at every stupid thing every boy said and who lowered her eyes at the right moment and deferred, who learned to defer when the boys took over the conversation...this was conscious but it was at the same time motivated and fully-felt this was real, real acting."

College transformed the transformation. She attended Vassar, an all-girls college in a time when many all-male schools like Dartmouth and Yale were just opening their doors to women. Two years before Streep graduated, Vassar accepted male students. The four years she spent at the university ended her need to be deferential. Her early acting roles were not pretty, flirty ingenues. Instead of playing the sort of woman she'd tried to be in high school, she chose parts where the characters were often difficult, disagreeable, even unlikable. But whether she was playing a witch or a woman who left her family, she managed to make audiences feel for the characteroften more than the movies' directors or writers envisioned.

Even before she was a teenager, Meryl Streep realized she had a special gift. She noticed her talents as a young girl playing with her brothers. When she just told them what to do, they ignored her. When she became a character, they actually listened.

Transformation

For a moment, she was still Mary Louise. Then the little girl pulled her mother's half slip over her head, turning it into a scarf. As she swaddled her Betsy Wetsy doll, something changed. It was like looking at the world through different eyes, the way familiar landscapes shift when viewed through unfamiliar windows.

Meryl Streep was six years old. She was preparing to act in a Nativity scene. It was her first role.

"I felt quieted, holy, actually, and my transfigured face and very changed demeanor [was] captured on Super-8 [film] by my dad," she remembered in a speech at Barnard College over 50 years later. Her younger brothers were acting alongside her and she told the audience, "They were actually pulled into this Nativity scene by the intensity of my focus... my usual technique for getting them to do what I want, yelling at them would never ever have achieved [that.]"

Playing Mary, mother of Joseph, was the first step in Streep's long career. Despite this, she told The New York Times