71. Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood
      Silkwood (1983)

Karen Silkwood—based on a real-life whistle-blower at an unsafe nuclear plant—undergoes an ordeal that has forever linked Streep’s suffering face with our fear of nuclear power. Karen reveals her factory’s questionable safety standards and soon after finds herself so contaminated with plutonium that even her bathroom sink sets off a Geiger counter. Streep loses her patrician self entirely in the loose-limbed, radical Texan, who flashes a harassing coworker and takes bites of other people’s sandwiches. With a simple flare of her nostrils and widening of her eyes, you can feel her skin crawl at the thought of the radioactive poison in her body.

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