Meryl Streep · 1978 · Signature Roles
Holocaust was a television event: a four-part miniseries that told the story of the Nazi genocide through two fictional Berlin families, one Jewish, one German.
Holocaust was a television event: a four-part miniseries that told the story of the Nazi genocide through two fictional Berlin families, one Jewish, one German. Meryl Streep played Inga Helms Weiss, a German woman married to a Jewish artist, whose love for her husband puts her in danger and whose choices trace the moral collapse of ordinary Germany.
Broadcast in the United States in April 1978, it was watched by tens of millions of people, many of whom had never seen the Holocaust dramatized at such length. Streep’s Inga — her accent, her resolve, her gradual understanding of what her country had become — gave the history a human face, and the miniseries won eight Emmy Awards, including recognition that helped cement Streep as a major screen presence before her film career had fully taken off.
