During a career spanning more than thirty years, the Hollywood grande dame has triumphed in movies as diverse as Kramer vs Kramer and Mamma Mia!

Meryl Streep

Born: 22 May 1949
Where: Summit, New Jersey, USA

One of the premiere actresses of her generation, Streep has been Oscar-nominated an astonishing fifteen times.

She has won Academy Awards twice - for her harrowing portrayal of a Holocaust victim in Sophie's Choice and an estranged wife in the drama Kramer vs Kramer.

The daughter of a chemical executive and commercial artist, she voiced at interest at becoming an opera singer when she was teenager but settled upon studying drama at Vasser College.

She went on to study drama at Yale where Sigourney Weaver was a classmate (they appeared together in a play set in a swimming pool called The Frogs).

She made her big screen debut in 1977 with a small role in Julia but it was her second feature - Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter opposite Christopher Walken - where she first made her mark with her first Oscar nomination.

The following year she won an Academy Award for her best supporting actress for her role as a dissatisfied wife opposite Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs Kramer.

She also won her first Emmy Award for the American television miniseries Holocaust.

In a busy year, she also played the acerbic lesbian ex-wife of Woody Allen in Manhattan and the Southern mistress of Alan Alda's callow politician in The Seduction of Joe Tynan.

Streep was engaged to The Deer Hunter co-star John Cazale until his death from bone cancer on March 12th, 1978. Later the same year she married sculptor Don Gummer.

Subsuequent work included the rain-lashed drama The French Lieutenant's Woman alongside Jeremy Irons, the death camp drama Sophie's Choice and the controversial anti-nuclear drama Silkwood.

In 1985, she starred in the romantic drama Out of Africa with Robert Redford and went on to play Lindy Chamberlain, the infamous Australian mother who was accused of being responsible for the death of her infant after claiming that a dingo took her baby, in A Cry in the Dark.

In the 1990s, Streep took a broader variety of roles, including a strung-out B-movie actress in an adaptation of Carrie Fisher's novel Postcards from the Edge, and a farcical role in Death Becomes Her alongside Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis.

Streep also appeared in the movie version of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits and a married lover in Clint Eastwood's adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County.

In 1999, she learned to play the violin for the movie Music of the Heart (she replaced Madonna) and also lent her voice to The Simpsons, King of the Hill and the Kubrick-Spielberg drama A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

In 2002, she co-starred with Nicolas Cage in Spike Jonze's quirky Adaptation as real-life author Susan Orlean and co-starred with Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore in The Hours.

She also landed an Emmy Award for her four roles in the TV adaptation of Tony Kushner's six-hour play Angels in America.

In 2004, she appeared in Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate, in which Streep played the role that Angela Lansbury had made famous.

Streep also starred in children's drama Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which reunited her with her Kramer vs Kramer co-star Dustin Hoffman.

In 2005, she starred in the comedy-drama Prime with Uma Thurman and went on to play a struggling folk singer in Robert Altman's last film A Prairie Home Companion.

The following year she gave a critically-acclaimed portrayal of a catty fashion boss in the satire The Devil Wears Prada and went on to play a reporter in the Iraq war drama Lions for Lambs.

Switching tack completely, she starred in the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! and then played a nun with her suspicions about an abusive priest in Doubt.