Being Meryl Streep

Until just a few months ago it was tempting to file Meryl Streep under the category "whatever happened to ..."

She is still regarded as the best of her generation for her roles in The Deerhunter, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Silkwood, Plenty, Out of Africa and A Cry in the Dark. But recently she seemed simply to have dropped off the map.

Critics were politely respectful about her last big-screen appearance, as an inspirational teacher in Music of the Heart (1999). The film before that, One True Thing (1998), in which Streep played a cancer victim, was never released in Britain.

The same year, she played an Irish spinster in a little-seen version of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa. And before that, all through the Nineties, she had a series of dud melodramas (Marvin's Room, The Bridges of Madison Country) and comedies (Defending Your Life, Death Becomes Her).

Possibly, like other actresses, Streep, 53, watched the offers dwindle with advancing age. But there was another reason she wasn't appearing so regularly. She has four children, aged 11, 16, 19 and 23, from her 25-year marriage to the sculptor Donald Gummer; when their eldest son, then 10, complained of always being the new kid at school, she began to turn down jobs which required extensive location shooting.

Yesterday, however, Streep received her 13th Oscar nomination and beat her former record, equalled only by Katharine Hepburn (Streep, incidentally, has won twice, for Kramer vs Kramer and Sophie's Choice).

She is back - and in two of the hottest, boldest, most talked about films in the Oscar race: The Hours, Stephen Daldry's elegant suite of variations on a theme by Virginia Woolf, which has received nine nominations and Adaptation, from Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, the team behind the surreal cult hit Being John Malkovich. Adaptation garnered four nominations in total, one of which was for Streep's Best Supporting Actress performance.

Streep has already collected double Golden Globe and Bafta nominations for her performances - Best Actress in The Hours and Best Supporting Actress in Adaptation - although there was a minor scandal earlier this month when she lost out in the Screen Actors Guild awards thanks to a clerical blunder.

"I don't have the kind of imagination that can visualise a bad script on the wing and the promise of the director's vision," she says. "But here I was, on my knees to my agent, thanking him. It's a rare thing that two such inventive, layered projects come along, and which are so very different from each other."

In The Hours, she plays a modern version of Clarissa Dalloway: an outwardly cheerful, quietly anguished Manhattan hostess whose story is interwoven with that of Woolf herself (played by Nicole Kidman) and a Californian housewife (Julianne Moore).

"Clarissa lets the needs of the day distract her from the central dilemma of her existence, which is that she lives in a moment that occurred 20 years before. She comes to understand that her authentic happiness resides all around her and she can actually touch it. The whole film is poised between hope and despair and that's why it's so interesting. It's about that precarious point where we all live."

Sitting in a hotel suite overlooking Central Park, Streep is dressed casually, her pale, patrician features almost bare of make-up. The tinted glasses are prescription lenses, not a star's affectation on a dark midwinter's afternoon. She squints across at me without them. "I'm me

... whatever that's worth," says the grande dame of American cinema lightly, with a shrug and mock sigh.

Unlike some actors of her stature, she is articulate, humorous, downto-earth and entirely prepared to analyse her work. She laughs, smiles, even giggles constantly. Yet her fame rests on big, earnest roles. by

"I know," she says. "But what can I do? It happened early. I'd played a lot of comic roles at drama school and on Broadway, but then I did Holocaust on television and Kramer vs Kramer. Very serious parts with long blonde hair. After that it was difficult to change people's perception of me."

Adaptation should shake that up. It's based on the journalist Susan Orlean's non-fiction book, The Orchid Thief, about a fanatical flower cultivator. On to this is grafted a story about the desperate efforts of Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) to adapt the book for a film.

As the on-screen Orlean, Streep gets stoned on an orchidbased opiate and pursues a poacher through the Florida Everglades. It's a first-class comic role, but did she have reservations about such an oddball project?

"I did. They could have got somebody so cute and young and I couldn't figure out why they wanted me. The script is very complicated - you can read it at quite an ironic distance and I had to be clear about the tone they were going to shoot it in. They said they wanted it to be dead real and emotional and believable. When I knew that, I thought, 'Oh well, they want me for what I know how to do.'