Missteps from a master: the five worst Meryl Streep performances

Posted On July 14, 2024July 14, 2024

Actors who go down in history as among the greatest to ever do it rarely give terrible performances, but neither do they boast a 100% success rate. Meryl Streep is an all-time talent, but she’s not immune from the odd misstep or two.

Of course, the good dramatically outweighs the bad when she’s the single most-nominated performer in the history of the Academy Awards, and her trophy cabinet is fit to bursting point with three Oscars, two Baftas, a trio of Primetime Emmys, and nine Golden Globes.

At this point, the chances are high that if Streep boards a drama, she’ll be getting a nomination for a major trophy at the very least. A broad generalisation, sure, but one that carries plenty of weight looking at how her career has panned out so far.

Not every performance gets to be a winner, and for Streep, the following five turns stand out as low points among a legendary filmography filled to the brim with excellence.

Five worst Meryl Streep performances:

5. Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, 2007)

On paper, a political drama with Streep, Robert Redford, and Tom Cruise promises a masterclass in acting, only for Lions for Lambs to instead deliver 92 minutes of humdrum tedium that feels like it drags on for at least three hours.

Streep is tasked with the sort of lengthy, dialogue-leaden exchanges she’s mastered effortlessly throughout her career, but she can’t even strike up a solitary spark with Cruise. The latter reins in his megawatt charisma, which only serves to flatten every exchange between them.

It’s not an awful performance in the strictest sense, but when the best actors have a way of elevating substandard material up to their level through sheer force of will, Lions of Lambs made for a crushingly disappointing and woefully dull time.

4. Before and After (Barbet Schroeder, 1996)

Some movies appear precision-engineered to capture awards season attention, and while that’s an admittedly cynical viewpoint, it’s the overriding feeling to emerge from the work of Streep and Liam Neeson in Before and After.

They play a married couple who discover their son is the prime suspect in the murder of his girlfriend. As cliché dictates, one of them is convinced of his innocence and the other isn’t quite so sure, with Edward Furlong caught in the middle of a drama that had its eyes on the prizes that never came.

The role of ‘mother who refuses to believe her darling child is capable of such atrocities’ is an archetype that’s been done to death, and it says a lot about the film as a whole that even Streep fails to add more than a solitary note or shade to the role of Carolyn Ryan.

3. August: Osage County (John Wells, 2013)

Streep is deep enough into her career that she knows any dramatic performance she gives is in with a good shot at winning an Oscar, but rarely has it felt as blatant as it did in August: Osage County.

It’s the star-studded adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the cast boasts Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Cooper, Julia Roberts, and more, and the story positions Streep with a showcase as the acerbic, sharp-tongued, and pill-popping matriarch of a family reunited through grief.

As tends to be the case, Streep did get an Oscar nod for her performance, but there’s something off about it. It’s almost as if she knows she’s going to be getting one, reducing her Violet Weston to less of an actual character and more of an exercise in overt showboating that ticks those awards-friendly boxes.

2. The House of the Spirits (Billie August, 1993)

Nothing screams ‘authentic Chilean characters’ quite like Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, and Winona Ryder, who all play members of the local Trueba family in period drama The House of the Spirits.

Adapted from an acclaimed novel, focusing on the ups and downs of a multi-generational clan during periods of political unrest, and leaning hard into the melodrama, there’s not a moment of the film that doesn’t feel manufactured explicitly to tug at the heartstrings or yank on those tear ducts.

Egregiously miscast and going through the motions, Streep sleepwalks her way through a poorly scripted and generally substandard drama that swallows up its talented cast and spits them out with absolutely nothing memorable to show for it.

1. The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011)

From the second Streep was announced to be playing Margaret Thatcher in biopic The Iron Lady, she was the odds-on favourite to win the Oscar for ‘Best Actress’. That’s exactly what she did, which is the problem.

There’s a very fine line in the realm of biographical drama between embodying the subject and doing an impersonation, a memo Streep clearly didn’t get. Her Thatcher is a caricature more than anything else, and not even the best to have been done when Spitting Image is a thing that exists.

The Iron Lady does everything expected of the prestigious biopic, and that’s the biggest issue. Mimicking the character she’s playing at the expense of giving a performance, Streep decided that imitation really was the sincerest form of flattery in the case, much to her own detriment.

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