All of Meryl Streep's TV roles
This TV movie marked Streep’s first on-screen appearance and television debut (her first credit was for voice-over work). Streep portrayed Susan Miller, the wife of the main character – a professional hockey player whose aggressive playing style results in the death of another man and his trial for manslaughter.
Streep is practically synonymous with Hollywood awards at this point, but she won her first major award – an Emmy – for her role in this 1978 mini-series about a fictional Jewish family during the Holocaust. She portrayed Inga Helms Weiss, a young Christian woman married to a Jewish artist who sacrifices her freedom to join her husband in a concentration camp where she is repeatedly assaulted and eventually raped. Here, Streep showcased her range and capacity for devastating drama that would earn her an Oscar in 1982's Sophie's Choice.
If you loved Meryl’s dancing in Mamma Mia, then this trippy conceptual take on Alice in Wonderland is for you. Streep stars as the titular Alice, the same Alice of Lewis Carroll’s creation, in this 1981 New York Shakespeare Festival adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Streep portrays a 7-and-a-half-year-old Alice who has a thing for interpretive dance and playing Flamingo guitars. (Google it, we beg you.)
It’s only fitting that one of Hollywood’s most renowned actresses would have a significant guest-starring role on one of television’s longest-running shows. Streep voices Jessica Lovejoy on The Simpsons, the rebellious daughter of Reverend Lovejoy and Bart Simpson’s first girlfriend. She made her most memorable appearance in the 1994 episode “Bart’s Girlfriend,” where she is quite the femme fatale, but the character has popped up in cameos in numerous episodes since and was even seen in The Simpsons movie.
Streep earned her second Emmy nomination for her work in this 1997 made-for-television drama about a severely epileptic boy who finds relief in a ketogenic diet. Streep starred as the child’s mother Lori Reimuller, who works desperately to find a viable treatment for her son when medications cause serious, adverse side effects. The story was based on the director’s own experiences with his epileptic child.
In 1999, Streep brought her voice talents to primetime animation once again on King of the Hill. Here, she portrays Aunt Esme Dauterive, a Southern matriarch who is the aunt to Hank Hill’s neighbor Gilbert Dauterive. Streep only made the one appearance in season 4 and in the eleventh season, it was noted that her character died of a fever.
Streep gave voice to a host of American historical figures in this 2003 16-episode mini-series about the history of America. Katie Couric served as host, while the likes of Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Kevin Kline, Matthew Broderick, and Reese Witherspoon lent their voices to a wide range of figures from American history.
Streep won her second Emmy for her quadruple slate of roles in the HBO mini-series adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America. Directed by Mike Nichols, the series is divided into two 3-hour parts that use magical realism to explore the AIDS crisis in America in 1985. Streep portrayed four characters including an angel, a rabbi, the mother of one of the play’s main characters – Joe Pitt, a closeted gay Mormon man — and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who haunts lawyer Roy Cohn as he dies of AIDS in the hospital.
Streep had a recurring role (she appeared 5 times) on this Showtime series that ran from 2011-2015. The show starred Lisa Kudrow as Fiona Wallice, a therapist who works with patients over the internet. Streep played sex therapist Camille Bowner, who has a passive-aggressive business relationship with Kudrow’s character.
Meryl Streep: All of the actress' TV roles
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