Early Life and Education
Streep was born in Summit, New Jersey. Her mother, Mary Wolf (née Wilkinson; 1915–2001), was a commercial artist and former art editor, and her father, Harry William Streep, Jr. (1910–2003), was a pharmaceutical executive. She has two brothers, Dana David and Harry William III. Her patrilineal ancestry originates in Loffenau, Germany, from where her second great-grandfather, Gottfried Streep, emigrated to the United States, and where one of her ancestors served as mayor. Another line of her father's family was from Giswil in the canton of Obwalden, a small town in Switzerland. Her maternal ancestors lived in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and were descended from 17th century immigrants from England. Her eighth great-grandfather, Lawrence Wilkinson, was one of the first Europeans to settle Rhode Island. Streep is also a distant relative of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and records show that her family is among the first purchasers of land in the state.
She was raised a Presbyterian, and grew up in Bernardsville, New Jersey, where she attended Bernards High School. She had many school friends who were Catholic, and regularly attended Mass because she loved its rituals. She received her B.A., in Drama, at Vassar College in 1971 (where she briefly received instruction from actress Jean Arthur), but also enrolled as an exchange student at Dartmouth College for a quarter before it became coeducational. She subsequently earned an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. While at Yale, she played a variety of roles onstage, from the glamorous Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an eighty-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.
Read more about this topic: Meryl Streep
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“In that reconciling of God and Mammon which Mrs. Grantly had carried on so successfully in the education of her daughter, the organ had not been required, and had become withered, if not defunct, through want of use.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)