Meryl Streep celebrates her 77th birthday on Monday, June 22, and the screen legend remains as busy and admired as ever.
Born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, New Jersey, the Oscar winner has spent decades redefining what it means to have a long, varied Hollywood career.
She earned her first major screen attention in the 1970s and has since built one of the most decorated résumés in film history, with acclaimed turns in everything from Sophie’s Choice and The Devil Wears Prada to Mamma Mia!, Julie & Julia, and The Iron Lady.
In recent years, Streep has stayed firmly in the spotlight through projects including Only Murders in the Building, where she plays Loretta Durkin, and Pixar’s Hoppers, in which she voices the Insect Queen. She is also expected to appear in a forthcoming Joni Mitchell biopic.
With renewed attention on her career, plenty of people online have also been revisiting a lesser-known detail about her: Meryl is not the name she was born with.
During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show in 2015, she opened up about both her birth name and the name she once wished she had instead.
“At birth I had to be named Mary because my mother’s name was Mary and her mother’s name was Mary and [so on],” Streep said.
“I named my first daughter Mary because I [wanted] to make everybody happy in the family, basically. So I was born Mary and Louise was my mother’s best friend… Louise Buckman.
“So I was named after her. But I was always called Meryl. My father made that name up and he liked that name.”
Despite that family backstory, Streep admitted she was never especially fond of the name.
“I wanted to be named Patty or Cathy. But I had glasses, and my name was Meryl, and [surname] had a ‘p’ on the end. It should have been ‘Street.’ [I always thought], ‘Why didn’t they just put a ‘t’ on the end instead of ‘p’?’”
More recently, Streep has also reflected on family life and the joy she gets from spending time with her grandchildren.
“It’s just grabbing seconds, just grabbing everything you can of them, with the knowledge of how completely fleeting it all is and how rapidly time goes. “This is what my mother said to me, and I said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ It’s the longest, shortest time. And you can’t get anything back. So take as much as you can…. I find it divine.”
“I have six grandchildren, six under six. They’re six, five, four, three, two, and one. I hope we’re not done, but we’ll see. I can’t even talk about how much it means to me that my kids give me as much time as they do with their kids.
“The only thing is that they’re on two coasts, so I’m in the airplane a lot.”