‘Sophie’s Choice’: Meryl Streep and the “really wild” attempt at learning Polish
History would indicate there isn’t much Meryl Streep can’t do from a performative perspective, which is just one of the many reasons why she’s held in such high esteem as one of the greatest actors to have ever graced the silver screen.
Whenever Streep lends her name to a movie, there’s a distinct possibility an Academy Award nomination is waiting in the wings, although she’s currently in something of a drought, at least by her standards. It’s been six years since she was shortlisted for an Oscar, which isn’t too bad, all things considered, but an eternity for a talent of her calibre.
In fact, it’s the longest she’s ever gone between nominations since The Deer Hunter marked her debut as an eternal fixture of Oscar season when she snagged a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nod all the way back in 1979, but it surely won’t be too long until she returns to the race given how inextricably linked she’s become with the most noteworthy ceremony on the annual calendar.
Streep took home her second statue for Sophie’s Choice, the adaptation of William Stryton’s novel that ended up infiltrating pop culture and becoming a byword for a decision where every single outcome will only yield negative or disastrous consequences. It probably wasn’t on the agenda when the book was being written, but at one stage or another, most people will have to make one of their own with varying degrees of fallout.
Playing Polish immigrant Zofia ‘Sophie’ Zawistowska, writer and director Alan J. Pakula’s tear-jerking classic finds Streep carrying a dark secret from her past that she brings into her new life, where she shares a boarding house with a fresh-faced Kevin Kline in his very first feature film role, and Peter MacNicol’s writer Stringo.
In the name of authenticity, Streep took it upon herself to become proficient in Sophie’s native tongue, but despite having tackled a multitude of accents, dialects, and languages on-screen, wrapping her tongue around Polish proved a much tougher nut to crack.
Mistakenly operating under the impression that “it would be a piece of cake like picking up Italian or French or something,” Streep repeatedly found herself stumped. In fact, she even described the process of mastering conversational Polish as “really wild” based on its ever-shifting syntax.
“You have to parse every sentence as you speak it; every word changes its ending according to whether it’s the object of a sentence or the subject or the indirect object,” she explained, with the linguistic gymnastics ahead of cameras even rolling, presenting a task equally tough – if not tougher- than reducing audiences to emotional rubble through her powerhouse work in Sophie’s Choice, which deservedly saw her scoop the prize for ‘Best Actress’ at the Oscars.
