Why There Can Be No One Like Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep Quotes: There are many reasons why Hollywood will never have another woman like here. She says it like it is.

Hollywood legend Meryl Streep needs no introduction. Renowned worldwide for her versatility, accents and 'layered depictions' in her portrayals, she is often regarded as 'the best female actor of her generation'.

Nominated for a record 21 Academy Awards, Streep has won three till date. She has also received a whopping 32 nods for Golden Globes, winning nine of them.

Some call Streep, the 'Iron Lady' of Hollywood for delivering consistently and clearly, her view on global happenings. She has been lauded time and again for her courage and integrity to speak her mind without any fear and inhibition. 

Here are some of the quotes by the legendary Meryl Streep which prove that there can be no one else like her:

On ageism and passing the 'starlet' age 

"I just thought that it was emblematic of what Hollywood thought of women who pass a certain age: that now they are old crones. It made me mad, so I didn't want to do that or play into it. Now, it's age-appropriate. I am an old crone, I'm 65 and I'm thrilled I get the chance to play such a  big, challenging musical part <Into The Woods, 2014>."

"You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you’ve lost a lot of people, you realise each day is a gift.”

“At 48 you were getting out the shovel ready to go in… I’m out there on behalf of all the old broads and I’m proud to be there.”

On Donald Trump's Presidency creating a social and political divide

"Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick 'em all out, you'll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts."

"When the powerful use their position to bully, we all lose."

On her stardom and acting

"My achievement, if you can call it that, is that I've basically pretended to be extraordinary people my entire life, and now I'm being mistaken for one."

"I like who I am now. Other people may not. I’m comfortable. I feel freer now. I don’t want growing older to matter to me."

"I try to lead as ordinary a life as I can. You can’t get spoiled if you do your own ironing.”

"Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there."

About her daughters

“My daughters had helped me to stop worrying about my appearance over the years. I wasted so many years thinking I wasn’t pretty enough and why didn’t I have Jessica Lange’s body or someone else’s legs? What a waste of time.”

Her advice to others

“Put blinders onto those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your own head.”

"My advice: don’t waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world."

"Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too."

"It’s good to push yourself and do what you don’t necessarily want to do, that if you’re not automatically good at it, you should try it. Trying is so important."

"The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself."

""You just have to keep on doing what you do. It's the lesson I get from my husband; he just says, Keep going. Start by starting."

On happiness, success and power

"Power, influence, strength — all those things can overpower what’s important in life. But as long as you have food and shelter over your head, if the necessities are taken care of, what makes us happy on top of that is very simple."

"The formula of happiness and success is just being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can."

"As there begins to be less time ahead of you, you want to be exactly who you are, without making it easier for everyone else."

On empathy and freedom

"True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us."

"The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy."

On religion

"I follow no doctrine. I don't belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram."

"I think I can understand the solace that's available in the whole construct of religion. But I really don't believe in the power of prayer, or things would have been avoided that have happened, that are awful. So, it's a horrible position as an intelligent, emotional, yearning human being to sit outside of the available comfort there. But I just can't go there."

On playing women-centric roles and womanhood

"People will say to me, ‘You’ve played so many strong women’ and I’ll say, ‘Have you ever said to a man, ‘You’ve played so many strong men?’"

“What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit and it takes grace.”

Miscellaneous quotes

“Fear is a good thing. Fear is your friend. Everything that destabilizes you can help you. They taught us that in drama school. If you’re comfortable, you’re not doing your job. Most actors are constitutionally insecure. It’s sort of necessary.”

“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing."

“Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”

"Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time."

Feature Image Credits: AFP