Meryl Streep will be the guest of honor at the opening ceremony of the 77th Cannes Film Festival which will take place on the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Tuesday 14 May. The actress will kick off the new edition which will end on Saturday 25 May with the awarding of the prizes by the President of the Jury, Greta Gerwig.
After Jeanne Moreau, Marco Bellocchio, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jane Fonda, Agnès Varda, Forest Whitaker or Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep will receive the Festival’s honorary Palme d’Or. 35 years after winning best actress for A cry in the nighther only Cannes appearance to date, Meryl Streep will make her long-awaited return to the Croisette.
“I am immensely honored to receive the news of this prestigious award. Winning an award at Cannes has always represented the highest achievement in the art of cinema for the international community of artists. It thrills me to stand in the shadow of those who have previously been honored. I can’t wait to come to France to thank everyone in person this May!” said Meryl Streep.
“We all have something of Meryl Streep in us!” said Iris Knobloch and Thierry Frémaux. “We all have something in us of Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie’s Choice, My Africa, The bridges of Madison County, The devil wears Prada And Oh mama! because he has spanned almost 50 years of cinema and embodied countless masterpieces. Meryl Streep is part of our collective imagination, of our love for cinema.”
After her acting studies and initial success on the New York stage, Meryl Streep’s career took off on the big screen in 1978 with The hunter, with Robert De Niro. In Michael Cimino’s film, Meryl Streep rewrote all of her lines to give nuance and depth to her character. She thus earned her first Oscar nomination—today, with 21 of hers in total, she holds the record for her as a performer—she is both hers in demand to play strong, ambivalent women. For example, when she starred alongside Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer, refused to let the film revolve around the male protagonist and rewrote a crucial monologue. Thanks to this role she won her first Oscar and quickly gained recognition from both the public and the industry.
Meryl Streep uses her intuition and hard work to reinvent herself with every appearance. Even in movie size: in The French lieutenant’s woman by Karel Reisz he played two roles. In Sophie’s Choice by Alan J. Pakula, her performance addresses a mother’s inconceivable moral dilemma. For this character she studied German and Polish to acquire the accent – impeccable according to Andrzej Wajda – and she won the Oscar for best actress.
Sidney Pollack’s unforgettable historical and romantic epic My Africa (1985) marked a new turning point, in which she and Robert Redford formed one of cinema’s most legendary couples. Far from limiting herself to the register of passionate love, Meryl Streep has also ventured into darker characters. In A cry in the night by Fred Schepisi in 1988, she played a mother accused of infanticide. Her performance earned her the Best Actress Award at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.
In the 90s, she tried her hand at crude comedy: she challenged female stereotypes in Postcards from hell by Mike Nichols and Death makes you beautiful by Robert Zemeckis. In The bridges of Madison Countyshe captured the screen alongside Clint Eastwood in a love story as impossible as it was timeless, which has gone down in cinema history.
Throughout her career, Meryl Streep has never shied away from publicly denouncing the precarious position of women in the film industry. Aware of the issues relating to the representation of women in Hollywood films and eager to embody all their facets in all their complexity and fragility, Meryl Streep plays a wide variety of roles and genres. After The Hours by Stephen Daldry and Radio America by Robert Altman, she played two roles as funny as they were unexpected that left their mark: the irascible editor of a fashion magazine in The devil wears Prada and Donna, a hippie who marries her daughter in the musical Oh mama!. She continued to star in biopics (The Iron Lady, Florence, Julie & Julia), political stories (Lions for lambs, The Post, Don’t Look Up) and family films like Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig, who serves as jury president at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Two women, two generations, two sources of inspiration and the same passion for the Seventh Art, gathered on the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
