Meryl Streep in her impersonation of characters, "subsuming herself into them, rather than personifying them". In her early roles such as "Manhattan" and "Kramer vs. Kramer", she was compared to both Diane Keaton and Jill Clayburgh, in that her characters were unsympathetic, which Streep has attributed to the tendency to be drawn to playing women who are difficult to like and lack empathy. Streep has stated that many consider her to be a technical actor, but she professed that it comes down to her love of reading the initial script, adding, "I come ready and I don't want to screw around and
Meryl Streep Canby, writing for "The New York Times", noted that the film was an homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, but that one of its main weaknesses was a lack of chemistry between Streep and Scheider, concluding that Streep "is stunning, but she's not on screen anywhere near long enough". Greater success came later in the year when Streep starred in the drama "Sophie's Choice" (also 1982), portraying a Polish holocaust survivor caught in a love triangle between a young naïve writer (Peter MacNicol) and a Jewish intellectual (Kevin Kline). Streep's emotional dramatic performance and her apparent mastery of a