Widely appreciated as one of the greatest actresses this generation, Meryl Streep was born June 22, 1949 in Summit, New Jersey. Since beginning her stage career in the early 1960s, Meryl has been a virtual powerhouse of the motion picture industry, starring alongside some of the greatest actors to ever grace the screen.

Meryl was born Mary Louise Streep and was raised in an upper middle class neighborhood in Bernardsville, New Jersey. After graduating as class valedictorian from Bernards High, she then enrolled at Vassar College in 1971 and earned her B.A. in Drama. After leaving Vassar, Streep then attended Yale.

At the Yale School of Drama, a young Meryl began to hone her craft while playing various roles in the school’s bevy of onstage productions. After graduating from Yale, Streep would then go on to perform in several theaters throughout New York City, including an appearance at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

It wasn’t long before Streep ended up on Broadway, and with a stellar performance in the musical Happy End, Streep won an Obie award and was well on her way to fame. Meryl soon hit the road and began auditioning for big-time motion pictures, but her anti-Hollywood looks made it rough going at first.

At an audition for King Kong, the Italian director commented that Streep was too “ugly” to play the role. Undeterred, Meryl kept auditioning for parts and eventually landed her first feature film with 1977’s Julia, in which she played a small supporting part.

Her next role came when her fiancé was cast in The Deer Hunter in 1978. Because of his influence, Streep landed a small part in the film. That same year, Meryl played a role in the television series Holocaust, and had to venture to Germany and Austria for filming. Upon returning, she learned that her fiancé John Cazale’s cancer had spread. He died in 1978.

The role she played in The Deer Hunter, alongside her ill fiancé, was more to keep close to him, Streep cites. However, critics were impressed, and after the film was released, Streep was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. This launched her career, and her next step was a Woody Allen film called Manhattan.

Streep then landed a major role in Kramer vs. Kramer, and now with two pictures to her credit that both won an Academy Award for Best Picture, she entered the 1980s with a boom. Her first film of the new decade would be The French Lieutenant’s Woman, with Jeremy Irons. Then she landed another big role in Sophie’s Choice.

Now pushing 40, Streep was intent to diversify her acting career, and she took on more challenging roles throughout the 1990s, including The Bridges of Madison County with Clint Eastwood and Postcards from the Edge.

When the new millennium rolled around, Meryl was just getting started. She starred in and won an Academy Award for her role in Adaptation, and she also starred in The Hours, Prime, The Manchurian Candidate, and other blockbuster films.

Meryl has had a handful of huge movies released in only the past few years, and she currently has one film in production, The Ice at the Bottom of the World, and others planned for the future, such as Dewey and Downsizing.