Key Points
Meryl Streep had an emotional reaction to a video of actress Jennifer Lawn Lejeune, who recalled playing her daughter in the 1982 Holocaust drama Sophie’s Choice.
“I even told my mother that [Streep] was my favorite mother, because Meryl Streep was always nice to me and playing with me,” Lejeune recalled.
Streep looked shocked, and her eyes welled with tears as she thanked host Laurent Delahousse for the “amazing” video, calling it “a gift.”
After appearing in over 100 films and television shows since the onset of her career, Meryl Streep‘s extended screen family has grown vast. But some still hold a special place in her heart.
The iconic actress and three-time Oscar winner was stunned into a tearful reverie on Friday during an interview on the French news program Journal de 20 heures. At the tail end of a conversation with Stanley Tucci to promote their hotly anticipated new sequel, The Devil Wears Prada 2, host Laurent Delahousse pivoted the conversation to Streep’s acclaimed turn in Sophie’s Choice, and handed her a tablet.
The camera then trained on Streep’s face, capturing as her expression transformed from pleasant to utterly shocked when she recognized who was speaking on the screen.
Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawn Lejeune in ‘Sophie’s Choice’
Credit: ITV/Shutterstock
“Amazing how it stays with you,” actress Jennifer Lejeune, previously known as Jennifer Lawn, shared in her own interview for 20 heures. “I even told my mother that [Streep] was my favorite mother, because Meryl Streep was always nice to me and playing with me.”
It was at this point Streep finally registered that it was Lejeune who played her daughter, Eva Zawistowska, in the searing Holocaust drama from director Alan J. Pakula. Streep turner her eyes to the ceiling and opened her mouth in amazement, slightly repositioning the tablet so Tucci could watch too.
“I think if she wasn’t able to build that bond with me, there’s no way we would ever have had that kind of reaction on set,” Lejeune concluded.
Hand clutched to her heart, Streep asked Delahousse, “That’s the child?” When she was informed it was indeed Lejeune all grown up, Streep exclaimed, “Oh my God, that’s amazing.”
Streep asked Delahhouse where the 20 heures team found Lejeune. He responded that she now lives in Paris.
“Well that’s amazing,” Streep remarked. “That’s very beautiful, thank you for that. What a gift. Journalists never give me gifts!”
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Adapted from William Styron’s 1979 novel of the same name, Sophie’s Choice dramatizes the haunted post-war life of Streep’s Zofia “Sophie” Zawistowska, living in a Brooklyn boardinghouse in 1947 and sitting on a soul-shattering memory.
Spoiler 44 years later: When Sophie was taken to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland by the Nazis, she was forced to choose whether her son Jan (Adrian Kalitka) or daughter Eva (Lejeune) should live; if she didn’t choose, neither would be spared.
In a 2014 commentary track for a Blu-ray release of the film, Lejeune, who explained that she married a French national and now works in finance, recalled shooting the harrowing scene in which she’s separated from her mother. While the cast “expected the first time and that’s it,” Lejeune explained that the scene was ultimately shot “13 times.”
“I totally thought it was the end of the world,” she said. “Absolutely. People tried to explain it to me, but I had such a bond with Meryl, so I think I got into the whole emotional part of it. Just as she was getting more emotional and scared, so was I.”
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