Do we like Meryl Streep?
Our score: 8 out of 10. She has spoken up for trans and gay people and for press freedom, and the one real stain is how she handled the Weinstein fallout in 2017.
Mary Louise Streep was born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1949, and trained in opera as a kid before Vassar and then the Yale School of Drama. She was a Broadway name in the seventies, with a Tony nomination for A Memory of Two Mondays, then made her film debut in Julia in 1977. A first Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter and an Emmy for Holocaust followed in 1978, and she has barely been out of work since.
The reason she's back in everyone's feed is The Devil Wears Prada 2, where she returns as Miranda Priestly twenty years on. She's been cheeky about it, telling Vogue the first time round nobody could find her clothes because “everybody was afraid of Anna”. Of the sequel's take on Miranda, she said they “pared her down” and made her simpler.
The spicier news is Jimmy Kimmel. After Trump posted on Truth Social asking when ABC would fire the host, Streep turned up on Kimmel's show and told him the public depends on him and “the world is listening”. That is the Streep pattern: she says the thing out loud, and she has taken Trump's swipes at her before without flinching.
On the harm test, she's a clear pass. At the Human Rights Campaign's 2017 gala she dedicated her award to her gay and transgender teachers and mentors, and told the story of a music teacher who transitioned and was fired after going back to work. She also warned that hard-won acceptance has to be defended. We found no harmful words of her own and no dodgy company, though the climate side of her record is something we couldn't properly source here.
The one proper stain is Harvey Weinstein. When allegations about him broke in 2017, Streep called his alleged behaviour inexcusable but said she hadn't known about it, and she described him as someone who had fiercely supported her work. Plenty of people found that hard to swallow, and she copped criticism for it. It reads as a blind spot rather than a pattern, and no court case has her as a defendant in anything we found.
The good stuff is real money and real use of her name. Press reports said she gave $500,000 to the Time's Up legal defence fund, which was set up to help people who experienced sexual misconduct get legal help. Her HRC speech also put her fame behind a group that was copping a hammering at the time.