Meryl Streep

Of the three Berlin awards to Meryl Streep's name, two attach to no work at all: a Berlinale Camera handed to three recipients in 1999, and an honorary Golden Bear in 2012. The single prize there for a performance, in 2003, is itself divided, an acting Silver Bear split three ways with Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore for The Hours. The French academy's honorary Cesar of the same year arrived in company too, hers alongside Bernadette Lafont and Spike Lee. Italy was plainer: the prize for a foreign actress reached her in 1984 and again in 1985, after two earlier listings in 1981 and 1982 that brought nothing. Three British Film Institute writers reach for other figures to place her, a Lady Macbeth in shoulder pads in The Manchurian Candidate, a flawless impersonation of the wicked witch in The Devil Wears Prada, and, for the guileless Roberta of Music of the Heart, a measurement against three other teachers she is found short of, Bette Davis in The Corn Is Green, Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and Sidney Poitier in To Sir, with Love.