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Now, with The French Lieutenant's Woman opening across the U.S. and Stab in the editing stage, Streep is enjoying a few months without professional commitments. She plays with Gippy, escapes with her husband whenever they can to a tree farm they bought not long ago in Dutchess County, and when she is in Manhattan tries to stay out of midtown, where every tourist comes equipped with a celebrity detector. She and Gummer are moving from his loft in Tribeca, an area in downtown Manhattan favored by artists, to a larger but equally unpretentious place just to the north, in Little Italy. Streep is now and forever a New Yorker, without a trace of a tan or of West Coast show-biz gloss. She bounces into a magazine photo session, wearing a dime-store sun dress and dark glasses held together by a safety pin. She is a fan of egg creams (a New York soft drink made of seltzer, chocolate syrup, milk and, of course, no eggs), and a resolute rider of subways; if the middle class and the rich don't use the subways, she argues, they will continue to fall apart and so will her beloved city. Streep is a liberal who is outraged by the Reaganauts in Washington, and a feminist who supports the ERA and who gets angry at the way films exploit women in sex scenes.
When she talks about herself nowadays, it is to tell about blowing sky high—not remembering her speech—when she presented an award at the Tony ceremonies a few months ago. Or to describe how, on the set of Stab, "I just couldn't get a scene right. The dialogue seemed false. I got madder and madder because I knew the answer lay within me, but I couldn't wrestle it up. I sulked all day—something I never did before. There's a lot of tension toward the end of a film, because the answers have to be there."
The privacy that she folds around herself falls away when she talks about her next project, which is to play Sophie in Director Alan Pakula's film of the William Styron novel Sophie's Choice. She says with deadly intensity, "I really wanted that part." She obtained a pirated copy of the script "through nefarious means," and, she continues, "I went to Pakula and threw myself on the ground. 'Please, God, let me do it,' I begged." Her own part secure, she urged that Actor Kevin Kline, 33, play opposite her as Nathan. ("The man's mad, he's brilliant.") Streep has the professional weight to do that now and make it stick, and Kline, who has been playing the pirate king in Papp's production of The Pirates of Penzance, got the part. The Sophie-Nathan pairing should be a memorable collision. Since Sophie must speak with a Polish accent, Streep plans to study Polish five days a week for three months before filming begins. "I don't know how I see the character yet," says Streep. "I'm still in the 'intuit' stage, and I haven't picked her apart yet. First I'll learn Polish. Then I'll forget me. Then I'll get to her. That's my plan of action."