Meryl Streep says comments made about Dustin Hoffman in resurfaced interview are not an 'accurate rendering'
Meryl Streep is clarifying comments she made over 38 years ago.
Slate recently unearthed a Time magazine interview with the actress from 1979 where she recalls an incident when her Kramer vs. Kramer co-star, Dustin Hoffman, allegedly touched her breast. "He came up to me and said, 'I’m Dustin — burp — Hoffman,’ and he put his hand on my breast. 'What an obnoxious pig,' I thought," she says of their first meeting.
After multiple news outlets called out the decades-old quote, Streep's rep released a statement, saying that the Time piece was not an "accurate rendering of that meeting."
"There was an offense and it is something for which Dustin apologized, and Meryl accepted that," Streep's rep added.
The resurfacing of the 68-year-old Oscar winner's interview comes on the heels of writer Anna Graham Hunter claiming in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporterthat Hoffman sexually harassed her when she was a 17-year-old on the set of the 1985 TV movie, Death of a Salesman.
"At 49, I understand what Dustin Hoffman did as it fits into the larger pattern of what women experience in Hollywood and everywhere," Hunter writes of the now-80-year-old actor, further alleging, "He was a predator, I was a child, and this was sexual harassment. As to how it fits into my own pattern, I imagine I'll be figuring that out for years to come."
In response to Hunter's story, Hoffman told THR in a statement, "I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am."
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Just last year, Michael Schulman's unauthorized biography, Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep, also told a story of an uncomfortable interaction between Streep and Hoffman as told by Kramer vs. Kramer director Robert Benton and producer Richard Fischoff.
The book alleges that on the second day of shooting the opening scene of the film — when Ted (Hoffman) follows a crying Joanna (Streep) into the hallway — Hoffman "shocked" everyone on set when he "slapped [Streep] hard across the cheek, leaving a red mark."
Benton told Schulman that he immediately thought the movie was "dead," and that Streep would "bring us up with the Screen Actors Guild." According to the book, she continued to act out the scene, but Hoffman started to taunt his co-star off camera to no avail.
"There was no way Hoffman could shake [Streep]," Benton notes. "No way he could do anything to shake her. She was just there, and she was an incredible force."
In addition to refining her remarks from 1979 about Hoffman, Streep also released a statement last month about her relationship with former Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein after multiple women came forward alleging that he had sexual harassed and/or assaulted them.
"The disgraceful news about Harvey Weinstein has appalled those of us whose work he championed, and those whose good and worthy causes he supported," she told The Huffington Post. "The intrepid women who raised their voices to expose this abuse are our heroes."
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