Word: meryll
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...Meryl had auditioned in New York occasionally while still at Yale. When she moved to the city, directors scrambled to use her. Her first professional appearance was at Lincoln Center in Joseph Papp's production of Trelawney of the Wells. Next she played in a program of two one-act plays and did the seemingly impossible: she became both a slovenly, bovine Southerner in Tennessee Williams' Twenty Seven Wagons Full of Cotton and a thin, sexy secretary in Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays. Says Director Arvin Brown: "The audience didn't realize that...
...Measure, she worked with John Cazale, a respected actor known to film audiences for his role as the cowardly son Fredo in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II. They fell in love and began living together. Actor Joe Grifasi, a friend of both at the time, says: "Meryl admired his ability to cut through the crap and focus on the essentials. He was very careful to maintain his equilibrium." They spent as much time together as their careers permitted; the summer of 1977 found them in Steubenville, Ohio, working on The Deer Hunter. Neither one talked...
...Meryl next went to Austria to work on the TV series Holocaust. Cazale was too weak to follow her. "I wanted to go home," she says. "John was very sick and I wanted to be with him. But they just kept extending the damn thing. It was like being in prison for 2½ months." Actor Fritz Weaver shared this internment and remembers Meryl admiringly: "In Holocaust she played a woman whose lover was imprisoned in a concentration camp. Meryl must have been living it twice, in the story and in real life. But there was not one moment...
Rushing back to New York, Meryl took a leave from acting to care for Cazale full time. During his last few weeks she moved into the hospital; every day she read him the sports pages, comically imitating the overheated delivery of TV announcers and trying to nourish his spirits until the end. He died in March 1978. Afterward, says Streep, "I was emotionally blitzed." She began work on Joe Tynan four months later: "It was a self ish period, a period of healing for me, of trying to incorporate what had happened into my life. I wanted to find...
Along with her work, Meryl found comfort in the companionship of Sculp tor Don Gummer, a longtime pal of her brother Harry's. Before some friends even knew they were seriously involved, they married in September 1978. Stage and film work kept Meryl on the run during her first months of marriage; since April, though, she has been staying home, where her husband works, in a sprawling studio-loft south of Greenwich Village. For fun they visit galleries and museums, go to the movies and entertain friends at home...