Throughout the years of her career, Meryl has portrayed women whose lives were not invented by screenwriters, but whose life stories have challenged, inspired and shocked the world – whistleblowers, alleged murderers, violinists or cooks of the French Cuisine. Take a closer look at the people behind the true stories, comparisons between film character and reality, accompanied by rare photographs, video clips and quotes by Meryl Streep and the people she portrayed.
Julia Child
The making of the cultural phenomenon that was Julia Child had three key ingredients: a man, a meal, and a TV camera. Five years after Child’s death, Meryl Streep plays the woman who revolutionized America’s relationship with food in “Julia & Julia”.
Ethel Rosenberg
In 2003′s “Angels in America”, Meryl Streep played the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, haunting lawyer Roy Cohn on his deathbed. What lies behind this episode of the award-winning mini-series is a tragic and still controversial episode of the 1950′s anti-communist era.
Roberta Guaspari
Roberta Guaspari’s story had Hollywood written all over it: A mother of two young sons emerges from a failed marriage and finds her calling teaching violin at a New York City public school in East Harlem. When budget cuts threaten to close her program, she fights and wins.
Lindy Chamberlain
In 1980, Lindy Chamberlain claimed that her baby daughter was killed by a wild dog. She was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering her child and pardoned years later after new evidence was found. One the worst cases of crime injustice in the history of Australia.
Karen Blixen
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. This is how Karen Blixen starts her probably most famous novel Out of Africa – as well as the opening of Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-winning film of the same name, which has been hailed as the greatest pastoral elegy of modernism.

Karen Silkwood

Was nuclear plant employee Karen Silkwood just a trouble maker? Or did she really had sensitive information collected that would prove a self-contaminating of plutonium, based on security holes that her bosses knew of? Her untimely death will remain mysterios forever.