[4] Streep made her stage debut in 1975 in Trelawny of the Wells, and the following year she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for a double-bill production of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and A Memory of Two Mondays.

At Yale, she supplemented her course fees by working as a waitress and typist, and appeared in over a dozen stage productions per year; at one point, she became overworked and developed ulcers, so she contemplated quitting acting and switching to study law.

[18] Streep played a variety of roles on stage,[20] from Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.

[30] Streep's other Broadway credits include Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical Happy End, in which she had originally appeared off-Broadway at the Chelsea Theater Center.

[45] Hoping to divert herself from the grief of Cazale's death, Streep accepted a role in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) as the chirpy love interest of Alan Alda, later commenting that she played it on "automatic pilot".

[49] In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a wife with a career,[50] and frequented the Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set, watching the interactions between parents and children.

[66] Greater success came later in the year when Streep starred in the drama Sophie's Choice (also 1982), portraying a Polish survivor of Auschwitz caught in a love triangle between a young naïve writer (Peter MacNicol) and a Jewish intellectual (Kevin Kline).

[83] Her next films did not appeal to a wide audience; she co-starred with Jack Nicholson in the dramas Heartburn (1986) and Ironweed (1987), in which she sang onscreen for the first time since the "Great Performances" telecast of the Phoenix Theater production of Secret Service (1977).

"[89] Biographer Karen Hollinger described the early 1990s as a downturn in the popularity of Streep's films, attributing this partly to a critical perception that her comedies had been an attempt to convey a lighter image following several serious, but commercially unsuccessful, dramas, and, more significantly, to the lack of options available to an actress in her forties.

[87] After roles in the comedy-drama Postcards from the Edge (1990), and the comedy-fantasy Defending Your Life (1991), Streep starred with Goldie Hawn in the farcical black comedy, Death Becomes Her (1992), with Bruce Willis as their co-star.

[100] The following year, Streep starred in The River Wild, as the mother of children on a whitewater rafting trip who encounter two violent criminals (Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly) in the wilderness.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Eastwood had managed to create "a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill", while Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal described it as "one of the most pleasurable films in recent memory".

[105] Longworth believes that Streep's performance was "crucial to transforming what could have been a weak soap opera into a vibrant work of historical fiction implicitly critiquing postwar America's stifling culture of domesticity".

In 1998, Streep first appeared opposite Michael Gambon and Catherine McCormack in Pat O'Connor's Dancing at Lughnasa, another Broadway adaptation, which was entered into the Venice Film Festival in its year of release.

[110] Janet Maslin of The New York Times remarked that "Meryl Streep has made many a grand acting gesture in her career, but the way she simply peers out a window in Dancing at Lughnasa ranks with the best.

"[112] Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan noted that her role "is one of the least self-consciously dramatic and surface showy of her career," but she "adds a level of honesty and reality that makes [her performance] one of her most moving".

[116][117] In 2001, Streep returned to the stage for the first time in more than twenty years, playing Arkadina in The Public Theater's revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, John Goodman, Marcia Gay Harden, Stephen Spinella, Debra Monk, Larry Pine and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

[55] A. O. Scott in The New York Times considered Streep's portrayal of Orlean to have been "played with impish composure", noting the contrast in her "wittily realized" character with love interest Chris Cooper's "lank-haired, toothless charisma" as the autodidact arrested for poaching rare orchids.

[121] In 2003, Streep re-united with Mike Nichols to star with Al Pacino and Emma Thompson in the HBO's adaptation of Tony Kushner's six-hour play Angels in America, the story of two couples whose relationships dissolve amidst the backdrop of Reagan era politics.

[131][31] Around the same time, Streep, along with Lily Tomlin, portrayed the last two members of what was once a popular family country music act in Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion (2006).

A comedic ensemble piece featuring Lindsay Lohan, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline and Woody Harrelson, the film revolves around the behind-the-scenes activities at the long-running public radio show of the same name.

[143] In this period, Streep had a short role alongside Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, and her eldest daughter Mamie Gummer in Lajos Koltai's drama film Evening (2007), based on the 1998 novel of the same name by Susan Minot.

[157] Streep re-teamed with Mamma Mia director Phyllida Lloyd on The Iron Lady (2011), a British biographical film about Margaret Thatcher, which takes a look at the Prime Minister during the Falklands War and her years in retirement.

Based on Tracy Letts's Pulitzer Prize-winning eponymous play, Streep received positive reviews for her portrayal of the family's strong-willed and contentious matriarch, who is suffering from oral cancer and an addiction to narcotics.

[166] Set in 2048, the social science fiction film recounts the story of a post-apocalyptic community without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice, where a young boy is chosen to learn the real world.

[176] In 2015, Streep starred in Jonathan Demme's Ricki and the Flash, playing a grocery store checkout worker by day who is a rock musician at night, and who has one last chance to reconnect with her estranged family.

[181] Following the duties of the president at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in 2016,[182] Streep starred in the Stephen Frears-directed comedy Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), an eponymous biopic about a blithely unaware tone-deaf opera singer who insists upon public performance.

Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair noted, "Streep could, in some senses, be approaching the film as a meta commentary on her own ivied stature as the world's greatest living actor (in some people's estimation, anyway).

[232] On April 25, 2017, Streep publicly backed the campaign to free Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker from Crimea who was subjected to a sham trial by Russia and jailed in Siberia for 20 years in August 2015.

[268]One of the most prolific actresses of screen and stage since her career's inception in the late 1970s, Streep's most acclaimed and highest-grossing films, according to the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, include Julia (1977), The Deer Hunter (1978), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Sophie's Choice (1982), Silkwood (1983), A Cry in the Dark (1988),[d] Postcards from the Edge (1990), Defending Your Life (1991), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Marvin's Room (1996), Adaptation (2002), The Devil Wears Prada (2007), Mamma Mia (2008), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), The Homesman (2014), Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), Little Women (2019), and Let Them All Talk (2020).