Meryl Streep · 1978 · Signature Roles
Linda is the woman at the center of The Deer Hunter’s love triangle: engaged to one steelworker, loved by another, waiting while both go to Vietnam.
Linda is the woman at the center of The Deer Hunter’s love triangle: engaged to one steelworker, loved by another, waiting while both go to Vietnam. Meryl Streep plays her without a trace of the “waiting woman” cliché. Her Linda is warm, funny, uncertain — a person, not a prize.
The film’s opening wedding sequence, nearly an hour of dancing and drinking in a Pennsylvania town, works because Streep and her co-stars make the community feel real. When the men return broken, Linda’s confusion and loyalty carry the home-front story, and her final scenes — choosing, grieving, enduring — give the film its quiet heart.
It earned Streep her first Academy Award nomination. She would be nominated many more times, but this is the one where audiences first saw what she could do with silence.