Meryl Streep names the most authentic actor in Hollywood: “A very high order of artist”

Posted On June 22, 2025June 22, 2025

Ask anyone who the greatest living actor is, and they’re likely to say Meryl Streep. Over the past five decades, she has become synonymous with dramatic excellence, raking in more Oscar nominations than anyone in history. Between 1979 and the present, she has earned a whopping 21 Oscar nods and walked away with three statuettes. Any year that does not include a Streep nomination feels illegitimate at this point.

Most actors worship at the altar of Streep the way they used to worship at the altar of Brando. Luckily, she is much easier to get along with by all accounts and tends to make life easy for her co-stars and directors. Even movie stars are starstruck in her presence, and working with her is one of the main bucket list items an actor has when they start to gain traction in the industry. Kurt Russell called her the Brando of her generation. She sent Jim Carrey to another plane of existence. And Tom Cruise spent years trying to fulfill his dream of working with her.

It will come as no surprise, though, that Streep herself isn’t out there loudly proclaiming herself to be the GOAT. She’s always been steadfastly self-deprecating and would be reluctant to praise herself at all, let alone claim the distinction of being the best there ever was. She has been generous with her compliments of other actors, often opting for more specific language than simply labelling someone the greatest of all time. In a 1997 interview with USA Today, she had particularly high praise for one of her most recent co-stars, singling out her lack of pretence.

When asked if there was an actor with whom she had particular chemistry, Streep responded, “That’s Diane [Keaton]. She is physically incapable of actorishness or falsity or any kind of punching up the line for the laughs. She’s just real. Because she’s really on a very high order of artist.”

Keaton is one of those stars who is so natural in front of the camera that it’s easy to underestimate her skill. She always seems as if she isn’t acting at all, and yet, unlike stars like Sylvester Stallone or The Rock, who always seem to be playing themselves, she has played a wide enough range of characters to prove that she isn’t just good at being a movie star.

A perfect example of this, as it happens, is her collaboration with Streep, the 1996 film Marvin’s Room. In it, she plays a woman dying of cancer trying to bring her family closer together, including her distant sister (Streep) and troubled nephew (Leonardo DiCaprio). It’s a quietly moving and warm performance, devoid of the usual theatrics that often accompany portrayals of characters suffering from terminal illnesses. She earned an Oscar nomination for the role, which is one of the few times that one of Streep’s co-stars has earned an Oscar nod and she hasn’t.

Keaton rose to prominence through her collaborations with Woody Allen, particularly Annie Hall. The combination of his naturalistic and often repetitive characters and her hyper-realistic style of performance might have given audiences the impression that she didn’t have to do much, but her work afterwards and Streep’s words prove the opposite. She might even be the most influential star in modern Hollywood.

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