President Smith Introduces Meryl Streep
Vassar Class of '83 Commencement

We have welcomed many commencement speakers to this campus, but rarely have we welcomed a speaker back to this campus, and rarely with such anticipation and pride. The name and face of Meryl Streep are known to millions of people. At the age of 33, she has been described as the most talented actress in the country. Her work in films, theater, and television has been rewarded with the highest accolades and honors of her profession. Yet only twelve years ago, Mary Louise Streep sat on the other side of this platform – also capped and gowned – listening to Eleanor Norton Holmes address the class of ’71, getting her degree, and waiting – like you – to get on with it. That she chose to be educated in the liberal arts tradition makes us all very proud. We know Vassar did not make her the actress she is today. Our best hope is that Vassar helped shape Meryl Streep, the person, who is also an actress; we like to think her work in the liberal arts at Vassar helped to ignite and expand the intelligence that illuminates her performances, helped to develop her innate abilities, and gave her the tools to identify for herself what would be important in her life.

Vassar did permit her to test herself as an actress and to work in many phases of the theater. While here she performed leading roles in many plays, one of them Strindberg’s Miss Julie. (Professor Evert Sprinchorn, then chairman of the drama dept., was leery of doing that notoriously difficult play with students who might "butcher" it, but after hearing Ms. Streep read the part, he changed his mind, and all who saw her performance remember it vividly). On other plays she worked on lighting crews, and, a talented artist, she designed costumes for a production of Camino Real.

Meryl Streep did not limit herself to drama. For three years she sang with the Night Owls. As a sophomore, she was vice-president of her class and helped coordinate Sophomore Parents’ Weekend; and according to a former roommate, Meryl owned the biggest collection of Johnny Mathis records in the world.

Nor did she limit herself to Vassar. Part of her senior year was spent at Dartmouth, and just before she was graduated, with departmental honors, Meryl made her Off-Broadway debut in New York, in The Playboy of Seville.

She was accepted at the Yale School of Drama with a three-year scholarship, and played more than 40 roles there. New York critics began to take notice of her work. In 1975, she received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale and the rest is a stunning story of success.

Within a year after graduate school, she had appeared in major roles at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, the New York Shakespeare Festival, and had won rave reviews and a Tony nomination for her portrayal of a lumbering, bovine 170-pound floozy in Tennessee Williams’ Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton, and made her first film, Julia with another Vassar alumna, Jane Fonda, and Vanessa Redgrave. Following an Emmy-winning performance in the TV mini-series "Holocaust," Meryl’s rise to film stardom was dramatic. In rapid succession, she made The Deer Hunter, for which she won the National Society of Film Critics award and received an Academy Award nomination; Manhattan, and The Seduction of Joe Tynan; Kramer vs. Kramer, which brought her the Academy Award for best supporting actress; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, brought yet another Academy Award nomination; Still of the Night; the soon-to-be released Silkwood; and Sophie’s Choice. For her tour-de-force performance as Sophie, she won her second Oscar, the 1983 Academy Award for best actress, and top awards from the New York Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Board of Review, among others.

Between films, in 1981, she somehow sandwiched in a return to the New York stage to star in a musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Her acting, singing, and dancing as Alice earned her an Obie.

This year, she won quite a different kind of award; she was named one of the outstanding mothers of the year by the National Mother’s Day Committee. Married in 1978 to sculptor Donald Gummer, she had her first child, a son, in 1979. The Gummers expect their second child this summer. Asked once if she would consider giving up her career if its demands conflicted with her personal life, Meryl answered that if it became necessary she would "because no enterprise is bigger than your life’s needs or your humanity." Shakespeare defined her rare quality in a line Meryl Streep spoke as Isabella in Measure for Measure: "I have the spirit to do anything that appears not foul to the truth of my spirit."

Please join me in welcoming Meryl Streep.