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The reviews of Kramer were rapturous, and she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. But the din from feature writers eager to probe her personal life was oppressive to Streep, a private person who feels (following the fashion of Actor Robert De Niro and some lordly professional athletes) that newsprint could wrap fish even better if reporters did not go through the messy and wasteful process of putting ink on it.
"For a while there it was either me or the Ayatullah on the covers of national magazines," she says with no pleasure. "It was excessive hype." Of course, the line between excessive hype and just the right amount of hype is difficult to draw in show business. But the excitement Streep stirs whenever she appears on a screen or a stage has nothing to do with puffery. It is a real, if sometimes clumsily expressed, response to an artist of rare skill and presence. Film Maker Robert Benton, who directed Streep in Kramer and a thriller called Stab, to be released next spring, calls her "one of a handful of really great actresses." It is nearly impossible to find a knowledgeable person in the film and theater worlds who does not use superlatives when talking about her. "There's nothing she can't do," Benton goes on. "Like De Niro she has no limits. I've watched Meryl over the years, and she's so staggeringly different in Kramer from the way she is in Deer Hunter—and try as I might, I can't figure out why. She has an immense backbone of technique, but you never catch her using it."
A viewer finds himself watching Meryl Streep much more closely than he is accustomed to watching actresses. More seems to be going on. It is not simply that she manages to make her face an astonishingly clear reflection of her character's complexities. It is not merely that this pale face, with its small, amused eyes and its nose long and curved as a flensing knife (when she kissed Alan Alda injudiciously in Tynan, this precarious nose displaced the flesh of his cheek up toward his eyeball), is poised fascinatingly between beauty and harshness. What makes the viewer sit forward in his seat is that Streep is so thoroughly a creature of change. Her expression is shadowed by a dizzying mutability. There is no doubt that in an instant this woman could take flight toward any state of emotion or mind.