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Papp's Shakespeare in the Park gave New York some of its most exciting theater a few years ago, and the 1976 production of Measure for Measure, with Streep as Isabella, was one of the high points of the series. Also in the cast was John Cazale, who had played Fredo, the weak brother, in the Godfather films. They fell in love and lived together until Cazale died of bone cancer two years later, at 42. By the time they worked together in Michael Cimino's Deer Hunter, Cazale was fighting for the strength to say his lines. Streep had contracted to film Holocaust in Austria, where, as Cazale was dying in the U.S., she played a woman whose husband was imprisoned in a concentration camp. It was a grim experience, but, says Actor Fritz Weaver, who worked with her, "there was not one moment of self-pity. She has tremendous professional devotion." Back in the U.S., she dropped her career to stay with Cazale for the months that remained until he died, in March 1978.
Afterward, she says, "I was emotionally blitzed. All my energy was channeled into my work. I was doing Joe Tynan at the time. It was a selfish 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."
Within a few months her life changed again. She began keeping company with Don Gummer, a sculptor friend of Third, a tall, dark-haired fellow in his early 30s, who had graduated a few years before from Yale's School of Art. After a couple of months the two were married, and late in 1979 Henry Wolfe Gummer, called Gippy, was born. When she was in England during the next spring and summer portraying the unhappy outcast Sarah, she was, in fact, a contented young mother, who breast-fed her baby during lunch break. Her husband stayed with the film company for the first month, then had to return to New York to get his own work—architectural constructions, mostly of wood or stone—ready for shows. Says Streep: "He felt so cut off . . . the phone bill for five weeks in Lyme Regis was $500."
Confecting an English accent was easy for her; "I think of myself as a great mimic." Classical training also helped, "primarily in getting me used to wearing a corset for hours at a time." Playing Sarah posed problems "because the reasons for her actions were so vague. I knew only that she was 'ambitious.' And because so much was covered up during Victorian times, I had to come on as though there was a fire inside, while remaining outwardly calm. I had, as the English say, to be careful about not going over the top. I played the monologue like a dialogue with myself. What my eyes said was the truth, and what came out of my mouth wasn't." Says Fowles, who is well satisfied with Streep's Sarah: "She was very shy about me. When I appeared on the set, she'd hide. She had some extraordinary notion that I didn't want an American actress. But there's no English actress of her age group who could have done it."