Meryl Streep, who holds the record as the most Oscar-nominated performer (male or female), may be her own best critic.
“You won’t guess because I’ve just collected a lot of awards for that film,” she said Friday on the Graham Norton Show, “It was venerated.”
She finally admitted the performance she is not pleased about was in the 1981 movie adaptation “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Streep played an actress (opposite Jeremy Irons) in the movie-within-a-movie whose character was having an affair both on and off screen.
“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,’” she said. “At the same time I was an American actress playing a British woman.”
Streep won a Golden Globe and BAFTA for her role in the film, directed by Karel Reisz.
“I didn’t feel I was living it,” Streep added. “You always want to do something better after the fact.”
The actress was on the show with costar Hugh Grant to promote their upcoming film “Florence Foster Jenkins.”
Grant, meanwhile, revealed which of his female costars disliked him on set: Julianne Moore (“loathes me”), Rachel Weisz (“despises me”) and Drew Barrymore (“hates me”). “She made the mistake of giving me notes,” Grant said of Barrymore. “How would you take that?” he asked Streep. I took it very well, didn’t I?” Streep joked, without skipping a beat.
