The Essentials: Meryl Streep's 16 Best Performances

There are strata of acting talent—there's the good, the very good, and the great. And somewhere up above all that, there's Meryl Streep. Mary Louise Streep was born in Summit, New Jersey, broke into film in the late '70s with a couple of remarkable supporting turns, and has never looked back. In fact, she's leapfrogged everyone's wildest expectations, and over the course of the past four decades has amassed a total of 19 Academy Award nominations (the only other actor alive who comes remotely close is Jack Nicholson, with 12). Now we're not ones to measure artistic standards purely based on Oscar history, but in Streep's case, it's a good-as-any indication of her talents (to put it another way, if the Oscars were really about who deserves recognition most based on performance alone, she'd have about 14 by now).

Famously deemed "not beautiful enough" by the apparently blind Dino De Laurentiis, Streep has a graceful aura, a kind of mystery that's the kernel of...