Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep

During the making of 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer (above), Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep clashed when the actor started using his method acting techniques on her. Streep told The New York Times in 2018 that Hoffman had slapped her during a scene without her permission.

“That was when we were making Kramer vs. Kramer. This is tricky because when you’re an actor, you’re in a scene, you have to feel free. I’m sure that I have inadvertently hurt people in physical scenes. But there’s a certain amount of forgiveness in that. But this was my first movie, and it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me,” she said. “And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping.”

Kramer vs. Kramer producer Richard Fischoff also told Vanity Fair that Hoffman used the recent cancer death of Streep’s fiance, The Godfather actor John Cazale, to trigger emotions in her performance: “He was goading her and provoking her,” Fischoff remembered, “using stuff that he knew about her personal life and about John to get the response that he thought she should be giving in the performance.”