The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

With Sophie’s Choice, which garnered Streep the Best Actress Oscar a few years later, she showed that she could also design a De Niro–style transformation. For the role of Sophie, a Polish Holocaust survivor caught in a love triangle between Kevin Kline’s Nathan and Peter MacNicol’s Stingo, Streep gained weight and studied Polish for months to learn the accent and language. On set, she wore false teeth, because, as writer/director Alan Pakula explained it, “Sophie would have lost all her teeth in the concentration camp. It was remarkable. And when she spoke Polish, she looked different.” When production moved to the flashback sequences set in the concentration camps, Streep lost more than twenty pounds and learned to speak German. As Streep was influenced, so she became an influence on other actors. Her work on Sophie’s Choice was an important bridge between De Niro and Daniel Day-Lewis, and Al Pacino would later credit Sophie’s Choice with inspiring his work on Scarface. He admired, and wanted to draw from, her “way of involving herself in playing someone who is from another country and another world [which] was particularly fine and committed and … courageous.” But Streep did not settle into a single technique in role after role. Instead, she reinvented her process again and again, depending on the particular challenge of the character she had decided to play. There was, for Streep, and for much of America, no One True Process.