How Meryl Streep Battled Dustin Hoffman, Retooled Her Role, and Won He. On March 1. 2, 1. Meryl Streep had been dating for nearly two years died as she sat at his hospital bed. She had met John Cazale, the crane- like character actor best known for playing Fredo Corleone in the Godfather films, when they starred together in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure for Measure in the summer of 1. From the beginning, they were an unusual pair: a pellucid 2. Yale School of Drama and a 4.

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THE CONTROVERSY OF ALEX ‘BULLHORN’ JONES being an alleged Zionist shill has now expanded to his apparent Zionist-Jewish connections on his 1) Personal Staff 2. At 29, Meryl Streep was grieving for a dead lover, falling for her future husband, and starting work on Kramer vs. Kramer, the movie that would make her a star and.

Cuban cigars. But the romance was tragically short- lived. Only months after she moved into his Tribeca loft, Cazale was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. When he was cast in the Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter, Meryl joined the film, in part, just to be with him. Cazale didn’t live to see the completed work. A few weeks after he died, Meryl’s brother helped her pack up her belongings. He brought along a friend she had met once or twice—a sculptor named Don Gummer, who lived a few blocks away, in So.

Ho. Only weeks after losing the love of her life, she had found the second love of her life, the man who would become her husband. It was this Meryl Streep—simultaneously grieving and infatuated, a theater actress new to movies—who got word from her agent, Sam Cohn, about a possible role in Kramer vs.

Kramer, based on a novel by Avery Corman. Corman wanted to counteract the “toxic rhetoric” he had been hearing from feminists, who he felt lumped all men together as “a whole bunch of bad guys,” he says now. His protagonist was Ted Kramer, a thirtysomething workaholic New Yorker who sells ad space for men’s magazines. He has a wife, Joanna, and a little boy named Billy. In the early chapters, their marriage is portrayed as superficially content, with wells of ennui underneath.

The problem is Joanna Kramer, who finds motherhood, by and large, “boring.” She starts taking tennis lessons. Sex with Ted is mechanical. About 5. 0 pages in, Joanna informs Ted that she’s “suffocating.” She’s leaving him, and she’s leaving Billy. Feminists will applaud me,” she says.) Ted overcomes his shock and gets back into the swing of single life. More important, he learns how to be a good father. It is then that Joanna does the unthinkable: she returns from California and tells Ted she wants Billy back. The ensuing custody battle, which gives the novel its title, lays bare the ugliness of divorce proceedings and the wounds they allow people to inflict on each other.

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Before Kramer vs. Kramer even hit the bookstores, the manuscript fell into the hands of Richard Fischoff, a young film executive who had just accepted a job with the producer Stanley Jaffe. Ted and Joanna Kramer, Fischoff thought, were like Benjamin and Elaine in The Graduate 1. The movie would be a kind of generational marker, tracking the baby- boomers from the heedlessness of young adulthood to the angst of middle adulthood. No one was yet calling people like the Kramers “yuppies,” but their defining neuroses were already in place. Jaffe took the novel to the director Robert Benton, best known for co- writing Bonnie and Clyde. Everyone liked the idea of a spiritual sequel to The Graduate, which meant that the one and only choice for Ted Kramer was Dustin Hoffman.

Midnight Cowboy and All the President’s Men had made the 4. Everyman, but he was now at one of the lowest points of his life. Amid contentious experiences filming Straight Time and Agatha, he was mired in lawsuits and countersuits, and was in the middle of an emotional separation from his first wife, Anne Byrne. Full Screen. Photos: 1/8. Photos: Meryl Streep Before She Was a Star.

Meryl Streep in New York City’s Theater District,1. Photo: Photograph by Duane Michals; From the DC Moore Gallery, New York. John Cazale and Streep during the filming of The Deer Hunter, 1. Photo: From the Core Collection Production Files of The Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Justin Henry and Dustin Hoffman in 1.

"Kramer vs. Kramer" wouldn't be half as good as it is. In tennis, "Battle of the Sexes" is a term that has been used to describe various exhibition matches played between a man and a woman (or, in one case, a doubles.

Photo: Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe. Streep in the film’s climactic courtroom sequence. Photo: © Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

Hoffman, Streep, director- screenwriter Robert Benton, and producer Stanley Jaffe with their Academy Awards, 1. Photo: © Columbia Pictures/Photofest. Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman while filming 1. Kramer vs. Kramer. Photo: © Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

Streep in New York City, 1. Photo: By Theo Westenberger/Theo Westenberger Archives, 1. Autry Museum, Los Angeles. Previous. Next. The filmmakers offered the part of Joanna to Kate Jackson, of Charlie’s Angels. Jackson had the name recognition and the crystalline beauty that Columbia Pictures required. But Aaron Spelling wouldn’t bend the Angels production schedule, and Jackson was forced to pull out of the film kicking and screaming.

According to Fischoff, the studio sent over a list of possible replacements, essentially a catalogue of the bankable female stars of the day: Ali Mac. Graw, Faye Dunaway, even Jane Fonda. Katharine Ross, who had played Elaine in The Graduate, was a natural contender.

With The Deer Hunter still in postproduction, the name Meryl Streep meant nothing to the West Coast, apart from sounding like a Dutch pastry. But she and Benton shared an agent, and if anyone knew how to get someone into an audition room, it was Sam Cohn. Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Corman’s novel and found Joanna to be “an ogre, a princess, an ass,” as she put it soon after to American Film.

When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody. When she gives up Billy in the final scene, it should be for the boy’s sake, not hers.

Joanna isn’t a villain; she’s a reflection of a real struggle that women are going through across the country, and the audience should feel some sympathy for her. If they wanted Meryl, they’d need to do re- writes, she later told Ms. The trio was taken aback, mostly because they hadn’t called her in for Joanna in the first place.

They were thinking of her for the minor role of Phyllis, the one- night stand. Somehow she’d gotten the wrong message. Still, she seemed to understand the character instinctively. Maybe this was their Joanna after all? That, at least, was Meryl’s version.

The story the men told was completely different. It was, for all intents and purposes, the worst meeting anybody ever had with anybody,” Benton recalled. She said a few things, not much.

And she just listened. She was polite and nice, but it was—she was just barely there.”When Meryl left the room, Stanley Jaffe was dumbfounded. What is her name—Merle?” he said, thinking box office. Benton turned to Dustin. Everybody Wants Some!! Full Movie Part 1.

Dustin turned to Benton. That’s Joanna,” Dustin said. The reason was John Cazale. Dustin knew that Meryl had lost him only months earlier, and from what he saw, she was still shaken to the core.

That’s what would fix the Joanna problem: an actress who could draw on a still- fresh pain, who was herself in the thick of emotional turmoil. It was Meryl’s weakness, not her strength, that convinced him. Watch: Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt on the Movies That Make Them Laugh, Cry, and Fall in Love.

Benton agreed. “There was a fragile quality she had that made us think that this was Joanna, without making her neurotic,” he said. Meryl’s Joanna wasn’t neurotic, but she was vulnerable, frail.” According to the director, Meryl had never been considered for Phyllis. It was always for the role of Joanna.

Clearly, there was a discrepancy between what they saw and how Meryl saw herself. Was she a fearless advocate, telling three powerful men exactly what their script was missing?

Or was she a basket case whose raw grief was written all over her face? Whichever Meryl Streep walked out of that hotel room, she got the part. Darling Billy. Streep in New York City, 1. By Theo Westenberger/Theo Westenberger Archives, 1. Watch The Mark Of Cain Online Hulu.