Meryl Streep’s role in the 1981 romance The French Lieutenant’s Woman earned her Bafta and Golden Globe wins and an Oscar nomination. It was also rated a prestigious four out of five Meryls by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw in a career roundup from 2015.
But the actor has revealed that despite the film being “venerated” she herself was unhappy with the performance, in which she plays both the tragic heroine of John Fowles’s novel – and the contemporary star playing her, who is having an affair with her leading man (Jeremy Irons).
“I didn’t feel I was living it,” Streep said on the Graham Norton Show. “You always want to do something better after the fact.”
“I’m giving myself an out, but part of it was, the structure of it was sort of artificial because I was the actress playing the French Lieutenant’s Woman. At the same time I was an American actress playing a British woman.”
Streep was on the show to promote her new film, Florence Foster Jenkins, in which she plays a famously atrocious singer in 1940s New York.
