 The year 1983 saw Streep play her first non @-@ fictional character , the nuclear whistleblower and labor union activist Karen Silkwood who died in a suspicious car accident while investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Kerr @-@ McGee plutonium plant , in Mike Nichols 's biographical film Silkwood . Streep felt a personal connection to Silkwood , and in preparation she met with people close to the woman , and in doing so realized that each person saw a different aspect of her personality . She said , " I didn 't try to turn myself into Karen . I just tried to look at what she did . I put together every piece of information I could find about her ... What I finally did was look at the events in her life , and try to understand her from the inside . " Jack Kroll of Newsweek considered Streep 's characterization to have been " brilliant " , while Silkwood 's boyfriend Drew Stephens expressed approval in that Streep had played Karen as a human being rather than a myth , despite Karen 's father Bill thinking that Streep and the film had dumbed his daughter down . Pauline Kael believed that Streep had been miscast . Streep next played opposite Robert De Niro in the romance Falling in Love ( 1984 ) , which was poorly @-@ received , and portrayed a fighter for the French Resistance during World War II in the British drama Plenty ( 1985 ) . For the latter , Roger Ebert wrote that she conveyed " great subtlety ; it is hard to play an unbalanced , neurotic , self @-@ destructive woman , and do it with such gentleness and charm ... Streep creates a whole character around a woman who could have simply been a catalogue of symptoms . " In 2008 , Molly Haskell praised Streep 's performance in Plenty , believing it to be " one of Streep 's most difficult and ambiguous " films and " most feminist " role . 
