Summer of Stars is a MovieJawn celebration of actors that have shined on the silver screen. Follow along as we count down some of our favorite players from various eras in the magical cosmos of cinema!

by Ryan Smillie, Staff Writer

Historically, a number of Hollywood’s most famous actresses had unique voices – Judy Holliday’s squeak, Lauren Bacall’s rasp, Katharine Hepburn’s often-imitated mid-Atlantic accent. But there aren’t many whose gestures are so immediately identifiable that Debbie Reynolds can do a hysterical, nearly silent impression on Larry King Live, and it’s entirely clear who she’s supposed to be.

It seems close to impossible to dispute Meryl Streep’s status as one of the best actors of all time. She’s been nominated for 21 Oscars, more than any other performer, and nearly double that of her closest competition. Katharine Hepburn, the only actor with more Oscar wins (four to Meryl’s three), didn’t win her fourth Oscar until just before her 75th birthday, and Meryl just turned 73. Meryl’s fame is interesting in that it has nearly nothing to do with her life off-screen, any non-acting ventures, any sort of sex symbol status – she’s simply famous for being a great actress. Her name has become synonymous with talent, and her fans run the gamut from casual moviegoers to confirmed cineastes. Even within her lesser performances, you can identify the hallmarks of a Meryl Streep performance, but I do think that the best demonstration of why Meryl is held in such high esteem can be found in one of her best performances – as Lindy Chamberlain in A Cry in the Dark.

Throughout Meryl’s career, she’s made a point of playing women who are difficult, misunderstood, or otherwise at odds with or mistreated by society. Of the real-life characters she has played, Chamberlain may have been the most mistreated of all of them. Wrongly convicted of murdering her baby daughter, Chamberlain spent years at the center of a notorious Australian legal and media frenzy, spending years in prison before new evidence was uncovered, proving that a dingo really did take her baby. In her portrayal of Chamberlin, Meryl accurately displays what it was about Chamberlain that seemed to fascinate and repulse Australians: her atypical displays of grief, her unsettling reactions in court, her religious certainty. But instead of luxuriating in the bizarreness of these traits and behaviors, Meryl tosses them off casually – they aren’t meant to shock or offend, they’re just the reactions that come naturally to Chamberlain. Another performer may have felt a need to nod towards the caricature of Chamberlain as concocted by the media, but Meryl smartly keeps her performance restrained, calling into question the then-popular, incorrect image of Chamberlain.

Really, you can’t talk about Meryl Streep without talking about the accents. Through some combination of excellent preparation and a talent for mimicry, Meryl is able to nail the technical aspects of a language, while also filtering them through her character. This has proven to be one of the most divisive performances of Meryl’s career, often appearing on lists of the worst Australian accents in film. (I do wonder if this perception is in any way influenced by Elaine Benes’s very funny “Maybe the dingo ate your baby?” on an episode of Seinfeld that aired shortly after A Cry in the Dark’s release). But most complaints about the accent stem from a misunderstanding of Meryl and director Fred Schepisi’s aims - it’s not just, “How would an Australian person speak?” but, “How does this Australian person speak?” And though her accent doesn’t always line up with the generic idea of an Australian accent, by all accounts, she sounds just like Chamberlain.

And that gets at the most essential aspect of a Meryl Streep performance – for as big as her performances can get, her characters never overpower her. Instead, Meryl is always in control, fully inhabiting her characters, and making even their strangest quirks seem like second nature. Here, it’s a distinctive accent – it’s often a distinctive accent – and an off-putting lack of emotion, but it’s the same ability that lets her play a high-on-hallucinogenics Susan Orlean in Adaptation or that allows her to believably demonstrate how somewhat-irresponsible factory worker Karen Silkwood would find herself becoming an outspoken union activist in my favorite of her movies, Silkwood.

Though her performances have trended towards the broad and hammy lately, Meryl has certainly amassed such a legacy of stellar performances that she should be able to do whatever she wants – whether that’s play a gender-swapped Donald Trump in one of the worst movies I saw last year, show up for a mere handful of scenes in a literary adaptation, or keep finding more chances to sing.

But if I had my way, I’d love to see her do two things in the hopefully many decades she has left. First, I’d love to see her return to the stage, where she got her start in the 1970s. I don’t care what she does, but I would pay any amount of money to see it. Secondly, I think it would be fascinating to see her sign on to a movie directed by one of the up-and-coming stage directors who are making their way into film – maybe William Oldroyd or Lila Neugebauer? Her work with Mike Nichols, who was acclaimed for both his stage and screen work, was always so good (Silkwood, Postcards from the Edge, Angels in America), I’d love to see what a collaboration with a younger director might look like. But even if neither of those ever wind up happening, we’ll always have plenty of perfect Meryl Streep performances to watch and rewatch. It’s hard to imagine anyone else ever having a comparable career.