The year 1998 brought two very different feature films. For the screen adaptation of Brian Friel’s play “Dancing at Lughnasa”, Streep put on a heavy Irish accent and dancing shoes. The story of five spinster sisters in rural Ireland, Streep was immediately drawn to the script: “It was so elegantly written and the characters were woven beautifully,” she says. “It was so subtle – everything was under the text, everything was subtext. But there was a character missing and that was this landscape – which I didn’t really see until I saw the film for myself,” she told The Irish Times upon its release. Despite good reviews, the film was little-seen in the United States.

In “One True Thing”, she played an all-american housewife and mother who is diagnosed with cancer. Her daughter, a savvy businesswoman played by Renée Zellweger, puts her career on hold to take care of her mother. The film was based on the book by Anna Quindlen, a fellow Benard graduate, who wrote about her own experience of caring for her mother. “I didn’t have to excavate very far when I was writing „One True Thing,” she told the New York Times in 1994. “You don’t forget the way cancer smells, and sounds, and looks, and progresses.” A frailer daughter might have been derailed, but, says Quindlen, “it railed me. When I went back to school, I was a grown-up.” While the film received mixed reviews for its Lifetime movie-of-the-week feel, Meryl Streep was lauded by critics and received another round of Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award and Academy Award nominations as Lead Actress.