Early 2018 saw the wide theatrical release of “The Post” in the United States and around the world. Meryl Streep picked up a Lead Actress award from the National Board of Review and was nominated for almost all major acting awards, including the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, and Academy Awards. But in early 2018, Hollywood had other topics on its mind: In October 2017, The New York Times and The New Yorker reported that dozens of women had accused the American film producer Harvey Weinstein of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse over a period of at least 30 years. It was the birth of #Metoo in Hollywood. Weinstein was eventually convicted for a number of his crimes and imprisoned. As several of her films were distributed by the Weinstein Company, including “The Iron Lady” in 2012 and “August: Osage County” in 2013, Streep gabe the New York Times and interview in January of 2018: “It really underlined my own sense of cluelessness, and also how evil, deeply evil, and duplicitous, a person he was, yet such a champion of really great work. You make movies. You think you know everything about everybody. So much gossip. You don’t know anything. People are so inscrutable on a certain level. And it’s a shock. Some of my favorite people have been brought down by this, and he’s not one of them.”

I think that people are aware now of a power imbalance and it’s something that leads to abuse. It’s led to abuse in our own industry, and it’s led to abuse across domestic workers’ field of work. It’s in the military, it’s in Congress, it’s everywhere and we want to fix that. We feel sort of emboldened in this particular moment to stand together in a thick black line dividing then from now. (Meryl Streep, E! News, January 07, 2018)

With a Best Picture nomination for “The Post” at the Academy Awards, Meryl Streep would be part of two more very successful motion pictures in 2018, although only in cameo appearances. She reprised on of her most beloved performances as Donna Sheridan in the surprising sequel/prequel “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”, which released theaters in July. With the original cast returning and a host of new talents playing their younger versions, fans were disappointed to learn, that, of all people, Donna Sheridan was dead. She appears by the end of the film, singing “My Love, My Life” to Sophie during her young child’s christening.

It’s a comedy where you actually experience loss. That’s what we’ve done with the Meryl character. Life is… you know, a bitch. We could only really move ahead with the sequel if we knew that Meryl was going to be part of it because she’s so much part of the first film. She doesn’t jump up and down at the idea of doing sequels; she’s an actress that likes to kind of make new experiences and challenges. For the first one, she’s in great sections and all that, And then if she was going to sing [in the sequel], what was it going to be? Because this time around, she’s not going to be running and jumping off roofs. So it had to be something different and it’s an incredibly affecting, key moment. (Judy Craymer, Marie Claire, October 21, 2018).

Director Ol Parker said in the same interview: “Meryl is incredibly proud of the first film, so she wanted to be in it, but she wanted it to be impactful. And she clearly wasn’t going to be in it for the whole movie. So I was the one that said, I think she should be dead. I think you should make a movie about getting over loss, overcoming something, and standing up and becoming yourself, and arising from the ashes of grief. So we then talked about that with Meryl, who was totally into it and excited by it. So then I went ahead and wrote the script on that basis. And then when we sent it out to everyone, Meryl was already in, which was amazing. So [the rest of the cast] all read it knowing that Meryl has already approved it and was excited to be in it. So people were saying yes immediately. It wasn’t forced on me. I was just trying to find the most dramatic and impactful story that I could find to tell.”

In December, she had a scene as Cousin Topsy in Rob Marshall’s “Mary Poppins Returns”, a sequel to the 1964 classic starring Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke. Topsy, played with an Eastern European/Slavic accent, performs a song and dance number called “Turning Turtle”, in which she compares herself to a turtle who has been flipped onto its back and is unable to function until someone comes along and rescues it. The musical was chosen by both the National Board of Review and American Film Institute as one of the top ten films of 2018 and received numerous award nominations, four Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score, Best Original Song (“The Place Where Lost Things Go”), Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design.