Meryl Streep · 1979 · Signature Roles
Joanna Kramer leaves her husband and her young son in the film’s first scene, and the audience is meant to judge her.
Joanna Kramer leaves her husband and her young son in the film’s first scene, and the audience is meant to judge her. Meryl Streep refuses to let them judge easily. Her Joanna is not cruel; she is drowning — a woman who lost herself in marriage and motherhood and needs to find out whether she exists apart from them.
When Joanna returns eighteen months later, transformed and determined to regain custody, Streep plays her not as a villain but as a person who has done painful, necessary work on herself. The courtroom scenes are devastating precisely because both parents are right, and both are wrong, and the law cannot hold both truths at once.
It won Streep the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, her first Oscar, and it remains one of the most humane performances of her career: a woman claiming her life, played without apology and without excuse.