EMOTIONAL effect, however disguised, has long been associated with the feminine psyche. Granted this is so, imagine how difficult it is for an actress to deliver believably without any real cause, except as the creative necessity to ‘act’. For the accomplished actress, emotional states are rendered without cheap and falsely exaggerated theatrics, which can easily be identified by artificial voice tones and loud traumatic behaviour.
The truly accomplished actress is able to deliver powerful, effective emotional states without exploiting the built-in emotional sensitivity of the feminine psyche. Meryl Streep is such an actress.

Early artistic experience
But when we consider Streep’s early lessons in singing Opera, a vocal form in which emotional form is perfected, it makes sense that she developed so quickly as a mature actress in command of the complex emotional situations she often inhabits on screen.
Add to that her High School involvement with drama, her early stage debut in New York in a Tennessee Williams play (this perhaps accounts for her ability to portray outrageous realism, a Williams quality), and to cap it off , her participation in the New York Shakespeare Festival, she was all primed up to debut on screen in ‘JULIA’ of 1977, a significant film debut, not only because of her appearance among three powerful emotional interpreters of screen acting, namely, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards JR, beside which she could not, indeed would not be allowed to make an ass of herself, but because the film’s theme of a female writer during the Holocaust of World war 2 involved the relationship between art and its possibility of influencing a more humane society, offered further creative interest in a direction worth pursuing.
Streep was no doubt spotted by cinematic professionals as an actress who could personify and intensify emotional states generated by contemporary social issues affecting Americans. That was the case with ‘THE DEERHUNTER’ of 1978, a film which concerns a crucial issue which has long tormented their society: How do lives sent out in violent messianic missions around the world become mentally damaged by such activities, and alienated from normal social behaviour upon return to their own society?
Streep, in ‘The Deerhunter’, is a ‘home-girl’ caught up in the simmering traumatic residues of her male lover’s heroics when he and his friends return from the Vietnam War.

Basic themes
More interesting than her Oscar nomination for ‘The Deerhunter’ was her role alongside Robert De Niro, an actor equally skilled in emotional accents on the male side. It was a good move for both of their careers when they reunited in 1984 for one of the best films of both of their careers, ‘FALLING IN LOVE’.
We can break down Streep’s film career into three directions:
(1) Personal emotional attitude
(2) Self-conscious roles reflecting some sort of artistic connection with others
(3) Emotional reactions resulting from some social or historical involvement. ‘KRAMER VS KRAMER’ of 1979 saw Streep’s reputation as an actress soar, because of her role as the exasperating young New York mother who walks out on husband, Dustin Hoffman and their little son, citing the perhaps popular personal and social reason back then, that she was looking for herself, etc.
The role captured the widespread 70s and 80s personal quest, among both men and women in Western societies who were challenging the unquestioned conventions of family life by stressing the equal necessity of allowing oneself the freedom to discover exactly what one’s personality was really like.
‘Kramer Vs Kramer’, while certainly being a male-oriented film, gave Streep the chance to further expose both the emotional and social freedom possible within the feminine psyche.

Emotional realism perfected
With ‘SOPHIE’s CHOICE’ of 1982, Meryl Streep really got to show us how real — as though we are not looking at acting at all — she could test the depths of both the mysterious strength, yet vulnerability, of the feminine psyche as she struggles as an American immigrant to overcome the memories of her experience in a World War II German concentration camp, and the traumatic decision she made there concerning the life of one of her daughters.
By now, any film fan of Streep’s roles could see how such roles went deeper than a national or American theme, exposing viewers to a universal human nature via the psychology of ‘acting’.
In 1981, her role in ‘THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN’ as an actress who falls in love with her co-actor as they act out the roles of two lovers in a play they are performing, offered her a unique chance to prove art’s power to affect reality intimately, romantically and  positively. But it is ‘Falling In Love’ of 1984, with Streep and De Niro as the two already married persons who accidentally meet in a busy bookstore during New York’s Christmas rush, and through a mix-up of their wrapped gift books being wrongly picked up, they meet again to correct the error, and a whole chain of events begin, which reveal the decay of their present marriages, and the beginning of fresh unavoidable love with each-other.
In ‘Falling In Love’, Streep stumbles and picks herself up, through emotional hurdles, brilliantly, and De Niro filled the same role with a masculine tenderness and special realistic mastery.
However, perhaps the highpoint of Streep’s career remains ‘OUT OF AFRICA’ of 1985, a film really worth seeing, where, as a bold, independent European woman in colonial Africa, she builds (and loses) an agricultural estate from the ground up, with the help of male African servants and tribal villagers.
The subtle achievement of this film is two-fold: It showed a woman’s individual adventurous spirit representing seminal human progress. It is not colonialism that is the value here, but the fertile power of individual human interactions and dependence. This is one of the unique films by a major radical American film director, Sydney Pollack, where the African servant is shown to be really the master via human dignity and humility as host, whose opportunity to serve positively and subtly leads history bigger than himself.
Streep’s emotional experience in ‘Out Of Africa’ emerges beautifully as she, like many of her other European friends in an African colony, come to treasure the silent power of their rustic hosts and their continent’s wild identity. It is with this film that Meryl Streep crossed the line from a mere professional realism in acting, to an emotional realism rooted in human experience. It is a genuine lesson we can find in varying degrees at work in her later films.