As a Polish immigrant who lived through the holocaust, Meryl Streep's performance in Sophie's Choice is positively heartbreaking and won her an Academy Award, which was for once entirely deserved. Sophie never has an easy life at any point in the film, being shown in flashbacks living through the German occupation with her Nazi sympathiser father and then being sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp with her two children; and later, living in New York but still experiencing hardships while living with her abusive paranoid schizophrenic lover Nathan (Kevin Kline). The film's title is completely apt, as not only does the story concern the one impossible choice Sophie must make in order to save the life of one of her children, but also the many other tough decisions the character makes throughout the movie on her own, and though they may not always be the right decisions, they're always hers and Streep shows immense courage and endurance in the face of unbearable events in her life.
