For years Hollywood has been trying to film John Fowles’s best-selling novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” After a decade of script and casting problems, United Artists finally has t he production going in England. The novel’s Victorian heroine, governess Sarah Woodruff, is being played by Meryl Streep, 30, Oscar-winning star of “Kramer vs. Kramer.” The male lead is Jeremy Irons, 32, an English actor best-known in this country for his work in t he TV series “The Pallisers.” The screenplay is by famed playwright Harold Pinter (“The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming”), and the director is Czech-born Karel Reisz (“Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”).

To entice Meryl Streep, one of our best young actresses, United Artists is not only paying her the obligatory $1 million salary but is also renting a studio in London for sculptor Don Gummer, her husband. He is reportedly hard at work there, sculpting in metal and glass. United Artists has also rented a three-story house for Meryl, her husband, their 7-monthold son* Henry and his nanny, Eileen Prescott. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” should finish location shooting in September, with t he film scheduled for release sometime next year. Streep, who regards herself a s basically a stage actress, is wanted by every studio in Hollywood – a community in which she prefers not to reside at this time in her life. Reared in New Jersey, educated at Vassar and Yale, she lives in New York City and one of its suburbs.