CHAPTER 3
Mother Meryl
The truth does not make it easier to understand, you know. I mean, you think that you find out the truth about me, and then you’ll understand me. And then you would forgive me for all those… for all my lies.—Sophie Zawistowska
(Sophie’s Choice, 1982)
Scene: A Manhattan restaurant. August 1979. Meryl, now thirty years old, was expecting her first child and being interviewed by New York Times reporter Janet Maslin about The Seduction of Joe Tynan. But Meryl teased the better movie, Kramer vs. Kramer, slated to hit theaters in December. “I’m set up as a villain,” she said, “so I like the idea of reappearing and trying to turn that around.”
Meryl would come to find motherhood enriching, and her superhuman ability to toggle between a quiet family life and movie stardom would astonish friends, who wondered how she did it. But onscreen during the 1980s, intriguingly, she continued to portray atypical mothers, like Joanna Kramer, making hard choices in movies where women struggled to survive in a man’s world. Exhibit A: Sophie’s Choice. If Meryl helped expose women’s history through her art, giving voice to the voiceless, then it’s no surprise that part of her duty as a feminist included shattering ideals and revealing painful truths about a hallowed role—mother—that hardly anyone, even Meryl Streep, can possibly live up to.
On hiatus from moviemaking, Meryl was happy to discuss husband Don’s new, thirty-five-foot sculpture at Castle Clinton in Battery Park. (“It’s a real big deal for him.”) The piece, called Surrounded by Divisions, marked a milestone that introduced his artwork to the masses. As an artist, she innately understood the drive to create, say, an understated wall relief in painted wood. And Don doubtless appreciated her passionate turn as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew—breathing fire and ice at the Delacorte Theater. She didn’t have to explain herself to Don, and vice versa. “She’s learned how to look at objects and I’ve learned how to look at people,” he said. An insecure husband might worry that his gorgeous and talented wife, a soon-to-be superstar, might leave him in the dust or, worse, trade up to Harrison Ford. Don exuded nothing but confidence. “There are many different levels of love,” he explained. “Ours is founded on a very deep-rooted feeling of trust. We’re best friends.”
The year before, Meryl graced the cover of Horizon alongside three other actresses—Swoosie Kurtz, Jill Eikenberry, and Tovah Feldshuh—whom the arts magazine identified as the next generation “of young screen stars, augmenting the recently heralded ranks of Jill Clayburgh, Diane Keaton, and Lily Tomlin.” In the accompanying article, Meryl revealed that she’d paid off her Yale debt partially thanks to Joe Tynan and The Deer Hunter. Though the middle-class girl from Bernardsville earned substantially less than her male costars, those paychecks bought security, relieving the stress of working overtime to survive in the big city. She could afford to take a break. But greater financial freedom came with a side effect: losing her prized anonymity, which allowed her to observe human behavior—an actor’s sustenance. She and Don unlisted their phone number after fans, tracking down “Gummer” in the phonebook, began calling for Meryl.
The Beverly Hills Hotel was another story. The staff of the swanky institution failed to recognize her when she stayed there for the 1979 Academy Awards. Meryl was unschooled in the protocol of performative glamour and fake-it-’til-you-make-it, committing a severe social faux pas: she actually swam in the pool—a place to see and be seen and not get wet! If she had played the “Do you know who I am?” diva card, then hotel employees would have been made aware of the Oscar nominee in their midst: a critical, if controversial, darling, The Deer Hunter had been nominated for nine awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Meryl. It was her very first nomination; on this special occasion, she wanted to wear something that would make Mary Streep proud, so she picked up an elegant, if unremarkable black silk dress at the department store Bonwit Teller.
On the big day, antiwar protesters gathered outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to demonstrate against The Deer Hunter, which stoked outrage and accusations of racism for its one-sided take on Vietnam. The Viet Cong, for instance, are shown torturing De Niro and Christopher Walken with a sadistic game of Russian roulette; De Niro seizes a machine gun and kills them all. Then there’s the last scene, where Meryl leads a singalong of “God Bless America,” the first time she sang in a movie. She chose to remain neutral amid the fuss, saying The Deer Hunter, named Best Film by the New York Film Critics in 1978, “shows the value of people in towns like that.” (She had seen it six times, once with John Cazale’s brother, Stephen. The torture parts were too much, but she liked watching Cazale.)
Ironically, the Best Picture category pitted The Deer Hunter against Coming Home, a politically liberal picture starring Jane Fonda (a.k.a. “Hanoi Jane”) as a VA hospital volunteer who falls for a paraplegic Vietnam veteran played by Jon Voight. The Academy’s voters crowned Deer Hunter the winner, also bestowing the Best Director and Best Supporting Actor statuettes to Michael Cimino and Walken, respectively. De Niro, up for Best Actor, was apparently so anxious he stayed home. Jane, who called Deer Hunter “racist” and refused to acknowledge Cimino backstage, won Best Actress. The actor-activist held no grudge toward Meryl, her up-and-coming Julia costar, whom she once suggested for a part in Coming Home.
A starstruck Meryl sat near Gregory Peck, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Bette Davis. “It was intense,” she said later. “I was completely in awe. It wasn’t like now, where everybody’s always everywhere publicly. Those people lived in rarified Hollywood and you only saw them on screen or in the most controlled ways—in magazines or something.” The inaugural nominee smiled while losing to California Suite’s Maggie Smith. Clearly, she was changing her mind about awards recognition. The truth: Meryl did love to win on some deep level, and this competitiveness prevailed over the part of her that felt it was unfair to rate one excellent performance above another. As she admitted in 2014, “I don’t like it, but I crave it.” (That Emmy she didn’t accept for Holocaust? A journalist spotted the trophy sitting atop a cabinet in her apartment.)
Film reviewers heaped praise upon Meryl in Deer Hunter. Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “smashing,” and Pauline Kael, the New Yorker legend who later became Meryl’s greatest critic, wrote that she “has the clear-eyed blonde handsomeness of a Valkyrie—the slight extra length of her nose gives her face a distinction that takes her out of the pretty class into real beauty. She doesn’t do anything standard; everything seems fresh. But her role is to be the supportive woman, who suffers and endures, and it’s a testament to Meryl Streep’s heroic resources as a mime that she makes herself felt—she has practically no lines.”
Months afterward, Meryl mesmerized critics in Manhattan, Joe Tynan, and Kramer vs. Kramer. They championed her screen presence, eager to introduce a rising star to fellow film buffs. The positive feedback helped establish Meryl as the Best Actress of Her Generation—buzzier than Swoosie, Jill, and Tovah—while she embarked on a challenging role that would require long stretches at home, changing diapers, not dialogue.
On November 13, 1979, Henry Wolfe Gummer arrived three weeks late, a breech baby delivered by C-section. “There was nothing to it,” Meryl said. “Don was with me and held the baby right after it was born. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.” She’d wanted children since girlhood; now she was among the first of her career-focused friends to have a kid. “I think they’re important to have around,” she remarked, “so I’m going to manage, however it’s possible.”
The new mother vowed to raise Henry in her parents’ tradition. “They were consistent with me. It’s important not to say one thing one day and then say ‘Oh, it’s all right’ the next. You need some kind of structure. I had that consistency as a child and it gave me a battering ram, a good thing to rebel against. I’ve been reading Dr. Spock and I think he’s been misinterpreted. He doesn’t advocate allowing children to do anything they want. He says listen to what your children are saying to you.”
In interviews, Meryl took parenting as seriously as her profession, betraying what appeared to be an anxious, albeit entirely rational, outlook for Henry’s future. “This child,” she told Ladies’ Home Journal, “will have to get us into the next century. His generation will have to deal with problems of survival that our generation never even thought of: pollution, depletion of natural resources, population control.…”
She was careful to own her special privilege as a successful working mom free to take Henry on a movie set and breastfeed him in a trailer. However, she noted, “it’s very difficult for women with other jobs. It’s odd that there are all sorts of incentives for women to enter the workforce, but little provision made for their children.”
During reshoots for Kramer vs. Kramer, Robert Benton heard pregnant Meryl say that had she been “offered this role now, I couldn’t have taken it.”
The divorce drama premiered December 19, 1979, just in time for the holidays. Even though Joanna appeared only in the beginning and end, Roger Ebert commended the balanced perspective that Meryl brought to the table. Sure, he hogs most of the screen time with his button-cute son (Justin Henry), but Ted Kramer—an advertising executive and absentee husband and father—is certainly no saint. “Right away we’re close to choosing sides and laying blame: How can she walk out on her home and child? we ask,” wrote Ebert.
But we can’t quite ask that question in all sincerity, because what we’ve already seen of Hoffman makes it fairly clear why she might have decided to walk out. She may be leaving the family but he’s hardly been a part of it. Harassed, running late, taking his son to school on the first day after his wife has left, he asks him: “What grade are you in?” It’s the first. Hoffman didn’t know.
Dustin, for his part, “saw Kramer as a lousy father who became a good father and who learned to be a mother.” Taking over Joanna’s role as primary parent, Ted experiences the penalties women confront in a hostile workplace when they become mothers. He gets fired for assuming a traditionally female role and making time to care for his son. He also masters how to cook french toast without burning it. Welcome to being a woman in 1979! When the court judge grants custody to Joanna, we do feel for Ted. He’s grown as a human being. He knows our pain.
Like many feminists, New West columnist Jeanie Kasindorf was unamused. “Many critics who have reviewed Kramer vs. Kramer have praised the film for its evenhanded treatment of the two parents in the custody fight. That is patent nonsense,” she wrote. “For almost two hours we watch Ted Kramer struggle with the demands of a single parent.… The only hint of evenhandedness is a stunning courtroom speech” by Meryl. Where were the movies about a working mother’s struggles? As Kasindorf argued, “Filmmakers, like many other men and women, think that cooking french toast in the morning is nothing special when a woman does it because it is what is ‘expected’ of women. So there is nothing special to watch on a movie screen.”
On April 14, 1980, Meryl won an Academy Award for her breakthrough role. She triumphed over supporting actress contenders Candice Bergen and Barbara Barrie as well as her costars Jane Alexander (Kramer vs. Kramer) and Mariel Hemingway (Manhattan). Right before Jack Lemmon announced the result, Meryl grinned with giddy, nervous energy—as though Lemmon had already called her name. And when he did: Ahhhhhh! She kissed Dustin on the cheek and floated up the steps like Cinderella, accepting the award in a cream gown and jacket. Meryl’s long, Disney princess hair bounced off her shoulders. She was an Oscar-worthy shampoo commercial.
“Holy mackerel!” she proclaimed, deferring to Kramer’s men. “I’d like to thank Dustin Hoffman and Robert Benton, to whom I owe this. Stanley Jaffe, for giving me the chance to play Joanna. And Jane Alexander and Justin”—blowing her screen son a kiss—“for the love and support during this very, very delightful experience. Thank you very much.”
She seemingly recited the speech from memory, struggling a bit to remember her lines amid the excitement. She radiated happy and humble and I hope you like me. The character, if you’ll remember: Teen Beauty Queen. Meryl could resurface the Bernards High babe when surrounded by powerful men and skeptical women whom she needed to win over to survive the social spiderweb of the entertainment industry. Dustin, homecoming king, took home Best Actor, while the Academy awarded Benton the trophies for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Last but not least, Kramer was named Best Picture—the rare character drama picture to achieve both critical acclaim and massive commercial success. Proving that Hollywood still produced movies for grownups, it made a whopping $106 million in an era when blockbusters such as Star Wars and Jaws topped the box office. “It was a movie that spoke to a lot of people’s lives,” says Benton, citing the timely rise in divorce.
BIG IN CHINA
“I am, weirdly. I mean, I was really surprised! The first time I went was about six years ago. We went to Beijing and Shanghai, but also went to Xi’an—I’d never heard of this city. Only, you know, half a billion people. But I got off the plane and many, many people recognized me and I was really, really surprised. I found out later that the very first film to be released in China after the cultural revolution was Kramer vs. Kramer. And every single person in China saw that movie.”—Meryl, casually mentioning her Tom Cruise–level international fame on Jimmy Kimmel circa 2012.
Backstage in the Oscars press lounge, gossip columnist Rona Barrett said feminists felt the movie “was a slap to them.” Dustin countered, “I can’t stop people from feeling what they are feeling, but I don’t think everyone feels that way.” Then Meryl showed up, metaphorically removing her teen-queen gloves to reveal the Vassar hippie underneath. “Here comes a feminist,” she declared. “I don’t feel that’s true at all. I feel that the basis of feminism is something that has to do with liberating men and women from prescribed roles.”
Meryl defended her characters. Joanna was suffering from depression, an invisible, misunderstood illness at the time. She’d managed to take action, entrusting Billy with Ted, a stable provider, so she could get help. Shouldn’t art provoke conversations? Reflect modern life in illuminating ways? Why did everything—every female character—have to be so black-and-white?
Kramer vs. Kramer boosted Meryl’s visibility at warp speed for a newcomer. Newsweek splashed her on the cover of its January 1, 1980, issue. The headline: “A Star for the ’80s.” In his glowing profile, senior editor Jack Kroll enthused that Meryl “may become the strongest performer of her generation, the first American woman since Jane Fonda to rival the power, versatility, and impact of such male stars as Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino.” Kroll waxed poetic, pondering, “Can one face express all these warring emotions, with a grave dignity that adds a deeper beauty to the physical structure?”
Sometimes important magazines can jump the gun, as when ingénue Gretchen Mol graced the September 1998 edition of Vanity Fair alongside the coverline “Is She Hollywood’s Next ‘It’ Girl?” She wasn’t. But, with Meryl, the hype happened to deliver. The exposure unsettled her, though. She wondered whether she deserved the attention. “It is the weirdest feeling,” she remembered. “A strange dissociation. You ride the subway and see something on the ground and look at it closely and see my face. There I was, all over the place. It made me feel mortal and made me feel how ephemeral the whole thing was. And sort of a little bit silly.”
WHEN THE QUEEN MET THE QUEEN
On March 17, 1980, Meryl shook Queen Elizabeth II’s hand at a screening of Kramer vs. Kramer in London. Her Streep-ness wore the off-white gown she would repeat to accept her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress the next month. (Hey, this was well before the Internet and Us Weekly began monitoring celebrities for fashion faux pas such as recycling outfits on the red carpet.) I hereby deem Meryl and Elizabeth’s groundbreaking first encounter a national holiday in America and around the world. Both women are forces of joy. Since Meryl has played Margaret Thatcher, among other British roles, I’m of a mind that the Queen should knight her American counterpart.
After Kramer, she told Sam Cohn, “I’ve got to do something outside of Manhattan, outside of 1981, outside of my experience. Put me on the moon; I want to be someplace else. I want to be held in the boundaries of a different time and place.”
She longed to dive with childlike abandon into a new life. “I had just done three movies, and I needed to jump and leap and feel the way I see my little boy play,” she said later. “And I wanted to forget the way I look, to become un-self-conscious, to have that freedom children have when they’re doing something in the middle of a room full of adults looking at them—and they just totally don’t care. Sure, maybe I can go to an analyst to try to not be self-conscious, but it never occurred to me to do that.”
Enter Sarah Woodruff, the Victorian-era outcast of John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which Harold Pinter adapted into a screenplay. The film had a dual structure. In the main narrative, Sarah, the village pariah who wears a witchy, brown cape, seduces paleontologist Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons), whose life turns to shambles when he leaves his well-to-do fiancée to pursue her. After Sarah bolts to parts unknown, he’s nearly driven mad. Has she become a London street urchin? A prostitute?! The disgrace!
Three years go by. Finally, Sarah reaches out with an update: She’s living a happy, healthy life as a governess in northwest England. The news infuriates Charles, who pays her a visit. But rather than exchange a polite hello, he pushes Sarah to the ground. How dare she desert him! “It has taken me this time to find my own life!” she asserts, explaining that she wanted her freedom. Now, she seeks Charles’s forgiveness. (“I must forgive you,” he relents.) Despite the physical violence and emotional manipulation, Sarah and Charles get a happy ending: a pleasant boat ride on Lake Windermere.
While all that’s happening, a parallel subplot partners Meryl and Jeremy as modern-day actors who strike up an affair on the set of—how meta—The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Meryl’s character, Anna, returns to her husband as if the showmance never happened, leaving Mike (Jeremy) heartbroken.
From May to September 1980, Meryl relocated to the UK for the shoot, which took place in the seaside town of Lyme Regis, among other locations. She and her family rented a home in London’s tony Kensington neighborhood. According to a People dispatch, Meryl “needed an extra inducement before United Artists could lure her to London.” The icing on the cake: “a studio and raw materials for her sculptor husband, Don Gummer, so he can create while she films.” United Artists, the movie’s distributor, had offered to pick up the tab.
She experienced preshow jitters, confiding to a friend, “I’m so frightened, I’m so frightened about something as important as this.” French Lieutenant tested her star power: if she successfully carried the romantic drama, then more leading lady roles would follow. She knew there were people out there who wanted to see her fail following so much success—no doubt actors in actors’ bars talking smack. She had battled anxiety before opening nights and big premieres, telling brother Third, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever done.” To which he would reply, “Don’t you remember? This isn’t the worst thing. The last thing you did was the worst thing.”
For Meryl, who wanted to do well, the fear of failure seemed to be a propeller: get gritty, do the work, and—fingers crossed—thwart public humiliation. She faced pressure not only to perform but transform, assuming a character’s troubles, tics, and accent. “Meryl was very concerned at first,” recalled Karel Reisz, her director. “We even had it up our sleeve that we could lip-sync some of those parts if it was necessary.”
To capture Sarah’s nineteenth-century speech, Meryl hired a voice coach and read aloud from Jane Austen and George Eliot. She studied photos of geisha women “because they demonstrated a highly formalized kind of femininity,” she said. “I give a lot away with my face and I wanted to work on revealing less; so much of Sarah is hidden, covered up—that’s what entices Charles and makes him give up his whole way of life.” Wearing a dramatic, if harsh, red wig and full corset for ten-hour stretches helped Meryl get into character. She made unexpected choices, like giggling instead of crying when Charles assaults Sarah. “That was one of the most miraculous acting moments I’ve ever seen, but the punchline is that they did six takes and she only did that once,” the director Mike Nichols later marveled. “To be able to tap into your inner responses and know that’s the deepest part of the character is to be a great film actress.”
Jeremy Irons was classically trained at Britain’s Old Vic Theatre School, founded by Laurence Olivier, and had played Petruchio in a West End revival of The Taming of the Shrew, bonding him closer to Meryl, who’d played Kate in New York. At first, Jeremy had been intimidated by Meryl’s work ethic and strong will. “Whenever she suggested something, I at least tried it,” he recalled. “If ever there was a possibility of confrontation, I tried it her way.” She pushed Jeremy to match her stamina. “When we shot the barn scene, where Meryl wakes up to me watching over her, it wasn’t going well after many takes. So she came over to me and physically shook me and said, ‘It’s hard, it’s hard. You have to do it though, it’s never easy.’”
In an interview after filming ended, Jeremy suggested their intimate scenes were authentic. “In order to reach the right emotional pitch, Meryl and I had to experience emotionally almost what the characters were experiencing,” he said. “So for the day we shot our love scene, Meryl and I had an affair. And when the cameras stopped, our affair stopped.” Meryl responded to clarify that she and Jeremy were “two good pals” who had been “playacting under the direction of Karel Reisz.”
She would be swarmed with awards, including a BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Actress, as well as another Oscar nomination (she lost to Katharine Hepburn for On Golden Pond). But, in hindsight, she still believed she hadn’t done enough. “I didn’t feel I was living it,” she confessed on the Graham Norton Show in 2016. “You always want to do something better after the fact.” And watching French Lieutenant, “I couldn’t help wishing that I was more beautiful.” She has said, “There comes a point when you have to look the part, especially in movies. In Victorian literature, passion, an illicit feeling, was always represented by darkness. I’m so fair that dark hair makes me look like some old fish, so I opted for auburn hair instead. I really wish I was the kind of actress who could have just stood there and said it all.”
On the flip side, what Meryl lacked in the feline sex appeal of, say, Jessica Lange, whom she alternately admired and envied, lent a layer of intrigue to Sarah Woodruff. Moviegoers wondered, What was it about her, exactly? She’s so plain. But she’s not not pretty. Meryl would use her polarizing visage to great advantage—it allowed her to sidestep the typecasting that discarded leading ladies who only played beautiful characters as soon as they hit forty, only to replace them with younger models. Because Meryl’s looks did not define her, she was liberated to become anyone she wanted. As a human being in a beauty-obsessed industry, she wasn’t immune to self-doubt. “I wasted so many years thinking I wasn’t pretty enough and why didn’t I have Jessica Lange’s body or someone else’s legs? What a waste of time,” she would reveal decades later.
Meryl had no interest in making “soft-core” fare that exploited a woman’s sexuality. She’d seen those scripts before, where a woman “emerges in half-light, half-dressed,” the sort of “character who doesn’t even have a name before they write the third draft.” She was “drawn to complicated, attractive, prickly women. I like them because I like difficult people in life.”
Her next challenge: Sophie Zawistowska. In April 1980, rumors swirled that Meryl was going to portray the Holocaust survivor in the big-screen adaptation of Sophie’s Choice, potentially with Al Pacino. Goldie Hawn campaigned for the role, and Barbra Streisand offered to take a pay cut. But Meryl interested writer-director Alan J. Pakula from the beginning. The problem: she asked to read his shooting script, and Pakula didn’t yet have one. He moved on to an obscure Slovak actress, Magda Vásáryová, who conveyed European authenticity but had little grasp of English (an eventual deal breaker). Finally, there was a script. Sam Cohn got his hands on a copy and sent it to Meryl. “I really wanted that part,” she said. “I went to Pakula and threw myself on the ground. ‘Please, God, let me do it,’ I begged.”
Pakula had pictures of Magda—whatever her name was—all over his office. “You can’t let her play it!” she recalled saying. “I have to play this part! You don’t understand. I can do it.” Without question, Meryl had the talent. But he worried her “technique” would become a problem. Could this strong, self-assured professional lose herself in an unguarded, sensual performance? Equally important: Could an American actress convincingly pull off the role?
Several weeks later, he offered Meryl the part. (You have to wonder whether he was making her sweat as penance for the screenplay request. According to Meryl, Pakula had been “mad” at her.)
Meryl recommended that Kevin Kline, thirty-three years old and already a two-time Tony winner, play Sophie’s vibrant, volatile lover Nathan. (Pakula’s short list of potential Nathans had included De Niro, Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman, all of whom he judged unfit.) The baby-faced Peter MacNicol, who starred in the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Crimes of the Heart, joined the cast as Stingo, a genteel southern writer who befriends Sophie and Nathan in 1947 Brooklyn.
Sophie was Meryl’s most complex character to date—soft yet strong, sexy and enigmatic, with warm humor masking terrible pain. After World War II, the Polish Catholic refugee flees to New York, vulnerable and broken, unable to speak English. Nathan, oozing charisma and manic energy, takes pity on Sophie and teaches her to read. They move in together, starting a codependent, roller-coaster relationship tethered to Nathan’s violent mood swings. Meeting the dysfunctional couple for the first time, Stingo witnesses a belligerent Nathan shake Sophie amid a temper tantrum. “I need you like a case of anthrax!” he screams. Also, “Go back to Krakow, baby!” Sophie, indebted to his sporadic kindnesses and grappling with undiagnosed PTSD, takes him back hours later.
Unbeknownst to Sophie and Stingo, Nathan is hiding the fact that he suffers from a debilitating mental illness: paranoid schizophrenia. As Stingo grows closer to Sophie, he begins to unravel the mystery of her past. Like Nathan, she’s perpetuated a lie—reframing her father as a hero and intellectual in defiance of Nazi Germany.
When Sophie owns up to the truth, the film switches to devastating flashbacks that reveal her life as a tragedy of unfathomable torment: She hated her dad, a law professor with anti-Semitic views from which she recoiled. His ideology offered no protection when the Nazis, coming for the intellectuals, sent the academic as well as Sophie’s husband to a German work camp, where they were both killed. Sophie, part of the underground Resistance, was arrested and deported to Auschwitz with her two young children, a boy and a girl. A sadistic Nazi officer ordered her to choose between them—sparing one child’s life and sentencing the other to die in a gas chamber. Sophie, hysterical, picked her daughter, Eva, a subconscious sign that she valued her son Jan’s life more; he was taken to a children’s camp, never to be seen again. Sophie, whose German was flawless, became a typist in the home of an Auschwitz commander. Miraculously, she survived starvation and the threat of death, but eventually succumbed to the guilt that would compel her to join Nathan in suicide by cyanide.
Though Meryl was prepared to do Sophie right, at first she struggled to find common ground. “The problem was that Sophie was such a victim,” she said. “She really let the tanks run over her.” The tanks, of course, were manned by the patriarchy: Nathan, her abuser in New York, isolates the immigrant within their small, prisonlike apartment, knowing she has nowhere else to turn. Soon enough, however, “I saw little bits of me in her,” said Meryl. “I found she had some spirit, a little backbone.” She admired Sophie’s resilience, how she weathered setbacks “with a lot of life and vitality.”
Given Meryl’s publicly voiced outrage over the human casualties of war—particularly, mothers grieving their children—the film historian Karina Longworth surmised that “this compassion for the price inflicted on women as collateral damage from the political conflicts of men helped her to connect to Sophie.”
It wasn’t until studying Polish that Meryl really got to know her. While shooting the Brooklyn scenes, she brought a trace of her Polish accent home, upsetting Henry. Meryl underwent five months of tutoring to learn the language. “I thought it would be a piece of cake, like picking up Italian or French or something—but it’s not,” she said. “It’s a lot like Latin because there are seven cases, I think—my teacher will kill me if I don’t get this right—grammar wasn’t my strong point, I can get the accent. Anyway, because of that it was real hard to learn, 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. It’s really wild.”
Before moving to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, for three weeks to film the concentration camp sequences alongside a European cast, Meryl was now required to learn a new tongue during her break. Pakula wrote the wartime scenes in English but believed, at the last minute, that they should be filmed in Polish and German, which meant a crash course in the latter for Meryl. “Get me a German teacher,” she told Pakula.
Overseas, Meryl faced a dilemma: Don was mounting a solo show at a Manhattan gallery. “I know how you’re going to feel about this, but please consider it anyway,” she wrote in a note to Pakula. “Don’s always there for me. Now I’m eating myself up that I can’t be there for him.” Pakula, at a loss, fielded advice from someone who said, “Tell her, ‘no,’ Alan, and put her out of her misery. Meryl just has guilt feelings. It’s up to you to relieve her of them.” Instead, Pakula trusted Meryl to pull through—and she did not disappoint. After less than twenty-four hours in New York, she made it to the set, conjuring Sophie with no apparent sign of jet lag.
Pakula had invited Kitty Hart-Moxon, who grew up in Poland and survived Auschwitz-Birkenau as a teenager, to help her understand what it felt like to be imprisoned in a camp. Meryl shed a dramatic amount of weight through a rigid diet that involved eating foods mixed in a blender and drinking few fluids. On camera, she was all skin, bone, and angles—a sliver of Brooklyn Sophie—with a short wig, discolored teeth, and sad, watchful eyes that managed to reflect conflicting emotions: despair and hope. Later, in America, Sophie was voluptuous and vivacious, yet her face (altered by Meryl’s prosthetic teeth) simultaneously conveyed sadness that memory could not erase.
Meryl read the scene where Sophie makes her choice only once. “I didn’t want to think about it,” she said. “I had memorized it because it was, like, engraved on my heart. When we shot it, I didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t want to be there. And we got it done. I didn’t need to think about, ‘What if I had to leave my son?’ I didn’t want to think about that at all!”
It is painful to watch, but, like testimony from Hart-Moxon, the ordeal serves to remind us that the atrocities of the Holocaust occurred not long ago, in broad daylight. We must keep the memory alive so that we never forget.
Like a shot of espresso, Sophie’s Choice invigorated Meryl. She received a buzz from the spontaneity of acting opposite her costars; no amount of research could prepare her for what developed when the camera started rolling. “Kevin and Peter MacNicol and I really fell mutually in love, just as the characters did in the film,” she said. According to an unnamed source in the December 1987 edition of Life magazine, Kevin was “smitten.” (At one point, Peter felt left out because Meryl, echoing Sophie, was paying more attention to Kevin on the set.) Meryl, you’ll continue to read, had that effect on her leading men. Here’s how Mike Nichols, who directed her in three movies and one TV miniseries, described it: “As she becomes the person she is portraying, the other performers begin to react to her as if she were that person. Whoever is playing the lover falls in love with her, whoever is playing the villain is frightened of her, whoever is playing her friend becomes her friend, and so on. She changes the chemistry of all the relationships. I’ve never seen anybody else do that.”
The impact: a stronger performance by Meryl, who must feel that Sophie loves Nathan. In turn, her excellence trickles down to strengthen the cast as a whole—even actors with far less talent than Kevin Kline.
Oh, him.
“Kevin is a dream! He’s heaven. He really is,” she said. “It’s a terrible job, you know. I mean, loving all those handsome and fascinating men.… Come on! It’s fun! It’s fun to recreate those feelings—and not have any of the repercussions.”
Come on! Wouldn’t you?
Kevin met few people who enjoyed their work as much as Meryl. He found her to be “one of the most blithely assertive people I’ve ever met. She has no neurotic self-absorption. She can make points as they evolve, spontaneously, moment to moment, without having to apologize for having an idea.”
Do go on.
“She’s healthy and sane,” he continued. “She’s also unencumbered by prejudgments about what one should or shouldn’t do.”
Pakula didn’t always approve of Meryl’s experimentation. When she insisted upon drinking real alcohol in a scene with Peter, Pakula agreed to her request but soon dismissed the footage as excessive. Otherwise, the star left the director in awe.
One night, he returned home in high spirits. He told his wife that he thought Meryl was a “genius,” a word he didn’t use unless he truly meant it. After Sophie’s Choice finally wrapped in New York in April 1982, Meryl and the crew “had a drunken evening,” and she “cried and cried.” She had felt alive—joyously, rapturously alive. Would she ever find a character like Sophie again, or had she peaked at thirty-two?