Meryl Streep Trivia
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48 free Meryl Streep trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Meryl Streep trivia quiz covers the most nominated performer in Oscar history from every angle. The early questions ask about the New Jersey girl who took opera lessons at 12, the Vassar production that changed her mind about acting, the Yale years waiting tables, the King Kong audition where a producer insulted her in Italian, and John Cazale. From there it moves through the films: The Deer Hunter, the Kramer vs. Kramer testimony she rewrote and the Oscar she left in the ladies' room, the Polish accent of Sophie's Choice, Silkwood, Out of Africa, the dingo case, Death Becomes Her, The Bridges of Madison County, Adaptation, Angels in America, Miranda Priestly, Mamma Mia!, Doubt, Julia Child, Margaret Thatcher and Big Little Lies. The last stretch is about the woman and the reputation: the accents from Danish to Bronx, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Cecil B. DeMille speech about Donald Trump, the Writers Lab for women over forty, the four children with sculptor Don Gummer, and the record 21 Academy Award nominations. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Try our Robert De Niro and Classic Hollywood quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is Meryl Streep's real first name?
Mary Louise
Mary Louise: she has always worked as Meryl, but her birth name resurfaced on screen in 2019, when she played a television character called Mary Louise.
Q 02In which state was Streep born and raised?
New Jersey
New Jersey: born in Summit, she went to high school in Bernardsville and acted in its school plays, yet she never set out to be a film actor and reached the screen only at 28.
Q 03At age 12, after a school recital, Streep began lessons in what?
Opera
Opera: her coach was Estelle Liebling, the New York teacher who had trained the soprano Beverly Sills, but Streep gave the lessons up in her teens and turned to acting instead.
Q 04At which college did Meryl Streep first take acting seriously, graduating in drama in 1971?
Vassar
Vassar: she had shown little interest in serious theatre until she played the title role in Strindberg's Miss Julie there in 1969, and the whole campus took notice.
Q 05At which university did Streep earn her Master of Fine Arts?
Yale
Yale: she took her MFA at its School of Drama in 1975, made her Broadway debut that same year and was nominated for a Tony the year after.
Q 06Auditioning for the 1976 King Kong remake, Streep understood when which producer called her ugly in Italian?
Dino De Laurentiis
Dino De Laurentiis asked his son in Italian why he had brought him something so ugly; Streep, who understood, said she was sorry not to be beautiful enough, and the part went to newcomer Jessica Lange.
Q 07Which New York-born actor's 1976 performance made Streep think 'that's the kind of actor I want to be'?
Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro: the film was Taxi Driver, and he soon repaid the compliment, suggesting her for The Deer Hunter after seeing her on stage in The Cherry Orchard.
Q 08Which actor, Streep's partner, was dying of lung cancer while they both filmed The Deer Hunter?
John Cazale
John Cazale, whom she met in a 1976 Central Park production of Measure for Measure, had terminal lung cancer during The Deer Hunter shoot; Streep nursed him until his death in March 1978.
Q 09Meryl Streep's first feature film was a small flashback role opposite Jane Fonda in which 1977 drama?
Julia
Julia left her deflated: most of her scenes were cut and she thought, 'I've made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business.'
Q 10For which 1978 miniseries did Streep win her first Emmy?
Holocaust
Holocaust: the NBC drama followed a Jewish family from Berlin through the Nazi years; it drew a vast audience and won Streep an Emmy before she had a single Oscar nomination.
Q 11For Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep insisted the script be revised because her character was what?
'Too evil'
'Too evil': Streep thought the script made Joanna a villain, so director Robert Benton let her rewrite her courtroom speech; Dustin Hoffman admitted he 'hated her guts' at first.
Q 12Where did Streep famously leave her first Oscar after her acceptance speech?
In the ladies' room
In the ladies' room: she set the statuette on the floor while she caught her breath after her speech, and was walking out when another woman shouted that someone had left an Oscar behind.
Q 13Which 1981 film cast Streep and Jeremy Irons as Victorian lovers and as the modern actors playing them?
The French Lieutenant's Woman
Q 21Which 1992 black comedy cast Streep and Goldie Hawn as rivals who drink a potion for eternal youth?
Death Becomes Her
Death Becomes Her: Streep found acting against special effects so tedious, likening it to a visit to the dentist, that she vowed never to make another effects-heavy film.
Q 22In which 1995 romance did Streep play an Italian war bride living on an Iowa farm?
The Bridges of Madison County
The Bridges of Madison County: to play Francesca she drew on the Italian stars Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, opposite Clint Eastwood, who also directed.
Q 23Streep's 1999 drama Music of the Heart was a rare non-horror film from which director?
Wes Craven
The French Lieutenant's Woman: John Fowles's novel offers alternative endings, so Harold Pinter's script invented the modern film-crew romance to give the story two different outcomes.
Q 14In Sophie's Choice (1982), Meryl Streep's Oscar-winning Sophie is an Auschwitz survivor from which country?
Poland
Poland: Streep wanted the part so badly that she got hold of a bootleg script and threw herself on the ground in front of director Alan J. Pakula, begging him for it.
Q 15Which 1960s Bond film star did William Styron picture as Sophie while writing Sophie's Choice?
Ursula Andress
Ursula Andress was the face Styron had in mind; director Alan J. Pakula first wanted Liv Ullmann, until Streep talked her way into the part and won an Oscar for it.
Q 16Streep's first real-life role, in a 1983 Mike Nichols film, was which nuclear whistleblower killed in a car crash?
Karen Silkwood
Karen Silkwood died in 1974 while driving to meet a New York Times reporter about safety failures at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant; the crash has never been fully explained.
Q 17Which Danish writer did Streep play opposite Robert Redford in Out of Africa?
Karen Blixen
Karen Blixen ran a coffee farm in Kenya until it failed in 1931; back in Denmark she turned those years into the memoir Out of Africa, published under the pen name Isak Dinesen.
Q 18For which film did Streep win at Cannes, playing an Australian mother convicted of killing her baby?
A Cry in the Dark
A Cry in the Dark, called Evil Angels in Australia, cast her as Lindy Chamberlain, who said a dingo took her baby; her conviction was quashed in 1988 and a 2012 inquest ruled she was right.
Q 19Streep was set to star in Oliver Stone's planned film of which musical before dropping out in 1989?
Evita
Evita: Oliver Stone had lined Streep up as Eva Perón, but she withdrew in 1989 after wrangling over her contract; Madonna finally played the part in Alan Parker's 1996 version.
Q 20Which friend wrote Postcards from the Edge (1990) and made Streep godmother to her daughter?
Carrie Fisher
Carrie Fisher drew the story from her own stay in rehab; less than two weeks after Fisher died, Streep closed a Golden Globes speech with her friend's line, 'Take your broken heart, make it into art.'
Wes Craven, the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, made it as his only mainstream film outside horror and thrillers, and it is the only one of his films to earn Oscar nominations.
Q 24Which New Yorker writer did Streep play in Spike Jonze's 2002 film Adaptation?
Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean wrote The Orchid Thief, the book the film is supposedly adapting, but the affair and the drug ring it gives her are pure invention by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.
Q 25In which HBO miniseries did Streep play four roles, including a rabbi?
Angels in America
Angels in America: Mike Nichols's film of Tony Kushner's play cast her as a Mormon mother, an elderly rabbi, Ethel Rosenberg and an angel, and brought her a second Emmy.
Q 26What is the name of the fashion editor Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada?
Miranda Priestly
Miranda Priestly came from a novel by Lauren Weisberger, once assistant to Vogue's Anna Wintour; fashion figures reportedly shunned the shoot for fear of offending Wintour, who then said she enjoyed the film.
Q 27On which real Greek island was Mamma Mia! filmed, standing in for the fictional Kalokairi?
Skopelos
Skopelos, in the Sporades, hosted the 2007 shoot, but the 2018 sequel left Greece altogether: its Kalokairi scenes were filmed on the Croatian island of Vis.
Q 28In Doubt (2008), Streep played the principal of a Catholic school in which New York borough?
The Bronx
The Bronx: writer-director John Patrick Shanley filmed in the borough and dedicated the picture to Sister Margaret McEntee, his own first-grade teacher, who advised on set and was the model for young Sister James.
Q 29Which chef did Streep play in a 2009 Nora Ephron film?
Julia Child
Julia Child: Streep played the towering, trilling TV chef in Julie & Julia, intercut with Amy Adams as blogger Julie Powell cooking all 524 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Q 30For The Iron Lady, Streep prepared by attending what?
A session of the House of Commons
A session of the House of Commons: she sat in on it in January 2011 to watch MPs in action, and the performance won her a third Oscar, 29 years after her second.