Meryl Streep's Most Dramatic Physical Transformations For Roles — In Photos

Meryl Streep is just about as A-list as an actor can get. With three Oscars, eight Golden Globes, 21 Academy Award nominations, and multiple EMMY and SAG awards under her belt, it's safe to say she's a bona fide thespian in every sense of the word (with a reported net worth of $100 million, to boot, per Celebrity Net Worth). 

Perhaps, however, it's the way Streep shows up on set that has catapulted her into undeniable success — always ready and willing to morph into the character she was hired to portray, joining the many actors who came before her who were willing to transform their bodies to get a role. "I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work," she famously told Vogue in 2002 (via Simply Streep). "For an actress, worrying about appearance is a horrible, horrible trap. It's great for acting to be unconscious of how you look and to be willing to mess up how you look, and see what that does to people."

Throughout Streep's career, she has been tasked with portraying a vast array of characters in various films, including "Sophie's Choice," "Death Becomes Her," "The Bridges of Madison County," "Julie & Julia," and, last but certainly not least, "The Devil Wears Prada 2."  Suffice it to say, Streep is willing to transform herself to properly execute a good role.

Meryl Streep had to drop an excruciating amount of weight to play Zofia "Sophie" Zawistowska, a Polish immigrant and holocaust survivor in the 1982 "Sophie's Choice" – 25 pounds to be exact. But that's not all; she also had to nail a Polish accent and learn all of her lines in both Polish and German. According to Streep, she first thought "it would be a piece of cake like picking up Italian or French or something," but quickly learned the opposite. "You have to parse every sentence as you speak it; every word changes its ending according to whether it's the object of a sentence or the subject or the indirect object," Streep revealed during an interview (via Far Out Magazine).

The story goes that those in charge of the 1995 film "The Bridges of Madison County" initially thought Meryl Streep, who was then nearly 45 years old, was too old to play Francesca, a character who also happened to be 45 years old. "So Clint made a, I gather, a case for me which I was glad about," said in an interview about how she ultimately secured the role. And the rest is simply history. Streep, however, was adamant that she worked overtime to truly embody the character. "I loved the way she talked and moved and spoke and so I basically copied her," Streep recalled (via YouTube). "I worked hard on imagining a physicality for her. And there, you know, this is part of an actor's fun is making sort of a fullbodied transformation," she explained. It's rumored, however, that the "fullbodied transformation" Streep spoke of just so happened to include gaining 15-20 pounds, per IMDb. 

In August 2009, Meryl Streep confessed that she gained 15 pounds to portray the role of American chef and French cuisine enthusiast Julia Child in Nora Ephron's film "Julie & Julia." According to Streep, however, gaining the weight proved much easier than losing it. "I'm still trying to lose it," she confessed during an interview for Ladies' Home Journal (via Simply Streep). Still, she was adamant, "It was worth it." And as it turns out, she picked up a few tricks of the cooking trade while filming, too. "You need a very good pan and if you don't have a really good pan, it's never going to work. And always cook at a high heat," Streep declared.