Karen Silkwood had been working there as a laboratory technician for two years.
The twenty-year-old, a native of Nederland, a town in Texas, had always dreamed of being a scientist, but she had to leave university when she married a young man from her town.
They went through the altar and had three children.
They separated seven years later due to her husband's perennial infidelity and his financial debts.
Ella Silkwood left him custody of the children and she went to Oklahoma, where she got that coveted job at Kerr-McGee, a nuclear fuel production company.
Faced with the company's continued negligence and violations of safety measures and quality standards, compromising the health of its employees, the young woman became a bold and vocal union activist, taking the case to the United States Government in 1974. A couple of months after that encounter, they discovered that Silkwood had been exposed to plutonium leaks and in quantities higher than those considered likely to cause cancer.
They also found plutonium in the kitchen or bathroom of her apartment.
Her commitment even earned her the animosity of her colleagues, who did not want to lose their jobs.
Just ten days after the diagnosis, when the activist was on her way to an interview with a reporter from
The New York Times
, carrying a
dossier
of evidence that incriminated the company, her Honda Civic veered off the road and fell down a hillside. .
Silkwood, 28, died instantly.
The strange circumstances of his death only hypertrophied media attention on the case.
Paradoxically, his death caused his complaint to achieve the impact it had not achieved before and she was branded a “martyr.”
The young woman's family denounced the company, supported by three aspects that caught the attention of police experts.
“The body of Karen's car had fresh marks indicating that she had been forced into the ditch.
The bulky
dossier
on Kerr-McGee had disappeared and several company executives appeared at the scene of the accident in a short period of time, without it ever being clarified who notified them,” the
New York Times
published at that time.
For its part, the company counterattacked by ensuring that the young woman abused tranquilizers and alcohol – they found traces in her blood – and that such was the obsession of the “lunatic” to prove that she was right that she herself removed the plutonium from the plant to self-poison at home.
Although a court ruled in favor of the union leader's heirs, an appeal court ended up revoking her victory in 1981. The plant closed a year after the death of Karen Silkwood, hailed as an internationally famous post-mortem heroine, whose face, however, will be remembered as that of Meryl Streep.
Meryl Streep in character as Karen Silkwood.ABC Photo Archives (Disney General Entertainment Con)
This March marks 40 years since the premiere in Spain of
Silkwood
, the film directed by Mike Nichols that brought the young woman's story to the big screen and which, despite its success, was not without controversy.
Starring Meryl Streep in full star streak after winning two statuettes for
Kramer vs.
Kramer
and
Sophie's Choice
, the film tripled its budget at the box office and earned five Oscar nominations.
The real milestone was managing to overcome the criticism received after its premiere.
Neither those responsible for the Kerr-McGee company – calling the film “false and defamatory” – nor
The New York Times itself,
which complained about the ambiguity of its outcome, calling it a “perversion of the journalistic genre”, applauded the dramatization. of a story that did manage to bring together anti-nuclear groups at the doors of the cinemas to raise awareness among the spectators who were going to see it.
Even Nichols himself had to defend himself by stating that the obligation to answer the question of whether Silkwood had been murdered or not was a good idea for a documentary, not for a work of fiction like his.
Karen Silkwood photographed on a motorcycle.mark peterson (Corbis via Getty Images)
Be that as it may, the script written by Nora Ephron and Alice Alren resonated for many more reasons than strictly cinematic ones.
Beyond continuing the path of the social genre that brought such good results to Hollywood between the seventies and eighties (
Serpico
,
All the President's Men
,
Norma Rae
,
Disappeared
, etc.), the film shines when it focuses on recounting private life of its protagonist apart from his adventures at the nuclear power plant.
Streep's Silkwood – which Jane Fonda pursued for years without luck – is very far from showing herself as the great American heroine: she is foul-mouthed, haughty, chaotic at work and outside of it, she smokes and chews gum non-stop, she does not blame herself for for leaving his family or for putting his activist crusade before the wishes of his partner, a
redneck
hunk played by Kurt Russell who was trying to free himself from the label of man of action.
“What I liked about Karen is that she was not a Joan of Arc.
She was an unpleasant person in some ways and yet she did a lot of very good things,” Streep confessed.
Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell and Cher in a still from the film.Courtesy Everett Collection Everett/Cordon Press
Another of the discoveries of the film is Dolly Pelliker, Karen's roommate who works as a maintenance person at the nuclear plant.
In addition to supporting Karen during her odyssey, Dolly is openly lesbian and maintains a relationship with another woman during the film.
It was so unusual to find a character like that in fiction that her interpreter, Cher, was the first actress in history to be nominated for an Oscar for a lesbian role and we would have to wait 15 more years for Hillary Swank to get the statuette for giving life to a young trans in
Boys don't cry
.
Cher's casting also baffled Hollywood.
More than established as a glamorous pop diva, the singer's efforts to start a career in Hollywood at 37 had been unsuccessful.
For eight years she could not get any film role because, as she herself maintained, everyone told her “that she was too Cher” to dilute herself into a character.
Cher considered that reputation to be the result of exaggeration and sensationalism: “I don't smoke, I barely drink and I don't take drugs.
I take care of my two children.
I have been married twice: once lasted eleven years and another three.
She didn't date more than one man at a time.
But do you know what happens?
That I dress strangely.
That's what I do.
Maybe people don't understand it, but I like it.
And it is not something that is going to change,” she recalled during a report on the film.
When she received the offer to appear in
Silkwood
, directed by Mike Nichols (
The Graduate
), she accepted without even reading the script.
Something that later forced the filmmaker to call her personally to tell her about the 'peculiarity' of her character.
She “Said, 'I have to tell you something.
She's a wonderful role, but she's a lesbian, a wonderful lesbian.'
And I said, 'Ok, fine, I don't care.'
The bet paid off and
Silkwood
was her ticket to the cinematographic Olympus.
Four decades after its release, its leading duo is not only still alive in the mecca of cinema, but the story – and conspiracy – of the union activist is also still alive.
Meryl Streep Kurt Russell in a still from 'Silkwood'.IFA Film (United Archives / Cordon Press)