Miranda Priestly (born Miriam Princhek; October 25, 1949) is a character in Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel The Devil Wears Prada, portrayed by Meryl Streep in the 2006 film adaptation of the novel.

Her family were poor but devout Orthodox Jews, who relied on the community for support because her father worked odd jobs and her mother died in childbirth.

While she remains just as ruthless and manipulative as she was in the book, she is seen in a few moments of vulnerability three quarters of the way into the film when she confides to Andrea her distress about her failing marriage and the effect she is worried it will have on her daughters.

[5] Streep received critical acclaim for her portrayal of Miranda, with reviewers taking note of how she made an extremely unsympathetic character far more complex than she had been in the novel.

"With her silver hair and pale skin, her whispery diction as perfect as her posture, Ms. Streep's Miranda inspires both terror and a measure of awe," wrote A. O. Scott in The New York Times.

"[7] Janet Brennan Croft of the University of Oklahoma reads the movie as a modern retelling of the Psyche myth (an early iteration of the heroine's journey), with Miranda in the role of Aphrodite, in which the character matures under the tutelage of an older female who at first seems purely to be tormenting her.

She compares the seemingly pointless tasks Miranda assigns Andy with those Aphrodite requests of Psyche: "By working through the conflict, the daughter/mentee also reaches a healthy balance of independence from and respect or love for the mother/mentor.

[9] Later that year, the "Money" episode from fourth season of The Office began with Michael Scott (Steve Carell), who had just been watching the film, yelling "Steak!"

In February 2018, on American reality television series Keeping Up With the Kardashians (season 14 episode 18), Kris Jenner dressed as Miranda, channeling her 'Boss Lady' persona.

[10][11] On the film's 10th anniversary, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote for The Washington Post that Miranda anticipated female antiheroines of popular television series of the later 2000s and 2010s such as Scandal's Olivia Pope and Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones.

Like them, she observes, Miranda competently assumes a position of authority often held by male characters, despite her moral failings, that she must defend against attempts to use her personal life to remove her from it, to "prov[e], as a creature of sentiment, that she never belonged there in the first place."