Meryl Streep

The first thing worth noting about Meryl Streep's arrival is how fast it happened. Her film debut was a small part in Julia in 1977. A year later The Deer Hunter brought her first Academy Award nomination, and in the same twelve months she won an Emmy for the television miniseries Holocaust. By 1980 she had a competitive Oscar on the shelf, for Kramer vs. Kramer. Three years from first appearance to statuette is not a career arc so much as a straight line.

What followed was a decade in which she was nominated more or less continuously. The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1981, Sophie's Choice in 1982, which won her Best Actress, then Silkwood in 1983, Out of Africa in 1985, Ironweed in 1987, A Cry in the Dark in 1988 and Postcards from the Edge in 1990. Seven further nominations in ten years, in accents ranging from Polish to Danish to Australian, which is the detail critics fixed on and occasionally used against her.

The accent business became a running joke, and it obscured something more interesting. A Cry in the Dark is the clearest example: she played Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman tried over the death of her own baby, and the performance is deliberately unlikeable - flat, defensive, hard to warm to. It won Best Actress at Cannes. She had worked out that sympathy was optional, which very few leading actors of the period were willing to risk.

She now holds the record for Academy Award nominations, at twenty-one, and for Golden Globe nominations, at thirty-four. The then-and-now comparison is therefore slightly beside the point, because the after is longer than the before and shows no sign of concluding. What the photographs actually record is a face that was never the selling point. She was cast for what she could do with it, and that has aged at a different rate from everyone else's.