Word: streep
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Kramer is an adaptation of one of those best-selling, touching novels that appeared a few years ago. Stunningly beautiful Meryl Streep plays Joanna Kramer, who walks out on a torturous eight-year marriage to her ad-man workaholic husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and her seven-year-old munchkin (Justin Henry). The divorce leaves Ted to mother his son, and for months he fails dismally; but after they establish poignant love, Joanna reappears and wants Billy back...
Despite her theatrical training, there is nothing stagy about Streep's performance in Kramer vs. Kramer. Emotions play across her face as subtly as breezes ruffling a pond; rarely have the varieties of anguish and uncertainty been so thoroughly catalogued through look and gesture. Streep's understated suffering rescues the character of Joanna Kramer from a virtually no-win plot: bad enough that a mother should leave her young child and then disappear from the film for nearly an hour; worse still that she come back and try to break up the new life that her husband...
...younger brothers grew up in the leafy and comfortable exurbs of central New Jersey; her father was a pharmaceutical-company executive and her mother a graphic artist who did most of her work at home. "I didn't have what you'd call a happy childhood," insists Streep. "For one thing, I thought no one liked me . . . Actually, I'd say I had pretty good evidence. The kids would chase me up into a tree and hit my legs with sticks until they bled. Besides that, I was ugly. With my glasses and permanented hair, I looked...
...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 a place where I could carry it forever and still function...
Moviegoers have yet to see the full range of Streep's art. She is an expert mimic (she copied her dead-on Southern accent in Joe Tynan from Dinah Shore) and can turn a hilarious pratfall. Her film roles have mainly been those of vulnerable modern women. She has not yet played a period character from a position of strength, but plans to start work on the screen version of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman early next spring...