MADRID – Three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep on Wednesday won Spain’s top arts prize, the Princess of Asturias award, for her “unforgettable performances” in a career spanning over five decades.
The prize jury praised the 73-year-old for “successive performances in which she brings life to richly complex female characters”.
“The honesty and responsibility she brings to her choice of roles, at the service of inspiring and exemplary narratives, reach out beyond the screen,” it added in a statement.
Streep has performed in more than 60 movies, acquiring iconic status for roles from a Nazi concentration camp survivor in Sophie’s Choice (1982) to an Abba-singing mother in Mamma Mia! (2008).
She holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations of any actor, having been nominated 21 times – 17 for Best Actress and four for Best Supporting Actress – since her first nomination as Best Supporting Actress for The Deer Hunter (1978).
She won her most recent Best Actress Oscar in 2012 for her role as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011).
Before that, she won Best Supporting Actress in 1980 for Kramer Vs Kramer (1979) and Best Actress in 1983 for Sophie’s Choice.
The €50,000 (S$74,000) award is one of eight prizes covering the arts, sciences and other areas that are handed out annually by the foundation named for Spanish Crown Princess Leonor.
Past winners of the arts prize include American directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke and American architect Frank Gehry.
The awards will be handed out at a ceremony hosted by Spain’s King Felipe VI and broadcast live on Spanish television in October. AFP
