Meryl Streep award received Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress
Streep is well known for her ability to imitate a wide range of accents – from Danish in Out of Africa (1985) to British Received Pronunciation in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Plenty (1985), and The Iron Lady (2011); Italian in The Bridges of Madison County (1995); a southern American accent in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979); a Minnesota accent in A Prairie Home Companion (2006); Upstate New York in Ironweed (1987); and a heavy Bronx accent in Doubt (2008). Streep has stated that she grew up listening to artists such as Barbra Streisand, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and she learned a lot about how to use her voice, her "instrument", by listening to Barbra Streisand's albums. In the film Evil Angels (1988, released in the U.S. as A Cry in the Dark), in which she portrays a New Zealand transplant to Australia, Streep developed a hybrid of Australian and New Zealand English. Her performance received the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, as well as Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.For her role in the film Sophie's Choice (1982), Streep spoke both English and German with a Polish accent, as well as Polish itself. In The Iron Lady, she reproduced the vocal style of Margaret Thatcher from the time before Thatcher became Britain's Prime Minister, and after she had taken elocution lessons to change her pitch, pronunciation, and delivery. Streep has commented that using accents as part of her acting is a technique she views as an obvious requirement in her portrayal of a character.
When questioned in Belfast as to how she reproduces different accents, Streep replied in a reportedly "perfect" Belfast accent: "I listen."
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