After her role in the television mini-series “Holocaust” in 1978 and four years later in ‘Sophie’s Choice’ for which she won her first Oscar for Best Actress that catapulted her into stardom, American actress Meryl Streep has continued to deepen her interest in the Holocaust subject.
Most recently, she leant her voice to film director Steven Spielberg’s newest 15-minute documentary “Auschwitz”. The film documents the founding of the death camp. It premiered last Tuesday in the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Its screening was part of the 70th anniversary commemoration of the camp’s liberation.
Spielberg traveled to the commemoration with several dozen survivors, their families and teachers for the screening and as part of a four-day seminar on Holocaust and genocide education.
The film and seminar are funded by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education which Spielberg founded in 1994.
Meryl Streep, who is undisputed one of the best actresses that the motion picture industry has ever produced, continues to win over the hearts of millions of fans throughout the world.
During a prize ceremony at the 65th Berlin Film Festival, Europe’s first major film festival of the year, which started Thursday, the actress spoke briefly to EJP’s Berlin correspondent and reflected on her roles in "Sophie's Choice" and "Holocaust", the two roles which first introduced European audiences to her and captivated them.
EJP: Ms Streep, what influence might your roles in the television mini-series “Holocaust” and in your Oscar winning performance of “Sophie's Choice” have played in your life? Or asked differently, how might events in your life or roles you have played influenced your later performances or your life in general?
Meryl Streep: “I’m not entirely sure. You know I think that what draws me to a project is the thing that’s not articulable. So it’s something direct, like music. It goes in. I read the script and something resonates and I feel I have to do it!
“So that means that this feeling existed in me, before I met the material. The material often describes something that I already feel. So I’m not sure if the piece changes me or if I go half-way to meet it.
“In terms of “Sophie’s Choice” and “Holocaust”: I do know that when I was a little girl, my mother dropped me off at the library one day. I never liked going to the library. It was a rainy summer day... I think I was ten. At some point, I opened a book and saw a pile of bodies in that book and I took the book home and I asked my mother, ‘what is this?’.
“It was the first thing I had learned about the Holocaust.
“The one thing that impressed me most, from those pictures were the shoes of the people. This is what I remember most - the shoes on the bodies. They looked like some of my mother’s shoes. They were modern shoes and I thought , ‘how could this have been happening in modern times?’.
“So that was one thing that was in me when I first met the material for “Holocaust” and later on for “Shopie’s Choice”. It made me want to read more deeply into it.“