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Meryl Streep is Oscars sister superior

The 59-year-old Hollywood icon is in the running for her third Oscar here Sunday, nominated as best actress for her role in religious drama “Doubt,” some 30 years after her first Academy Award nod for “The Deer Hunter.”

Streep is the biggest threat to British actress Kate Winslet’s chances of an Oscar, and perhaps ominously, won the Screen Actors Guild award last month.

“Even though awards mean nothing to me any more. I’m really happy,” Streep joked after collecting the SAG honor.

Yet although Streep says her previous Oscar wins have given her a sense of validation, she admits that defeat on Sunday will still hurt.

“When you lose, you think my work wasn’t any good. But it’s an honor to be nominated, and it is! It is. But you just feel worse when you lose than you did before you got nominated,” she told ABC television last month.

Streep’s first Oscar win came for 1979’s “Kramer vs Kramer,” followed by a second for her portrayal of a Jewish concentration camp prisoner in “Sophie’s Choice” in 1982.

Streep, though, has never been one to get carried away by the trappings of fame, preferring to live as anonymously as possible at her home, where she has raised her four children.

“Being famous gets in the way of a lot of things,” she once told an interviewer. “My family really does come first. It always did and always will.”

The graduate of prestigious Vassar College and Yale University has kept Hollywood and the media firmly at an arm’s length for years.

She insists on not working during her children’s school terms, spends little time with industry folk and left Los Angeles years ago and refuses to talk publicly about her personal life.

Yet the reluctance to play the celebrity game has not interfered with the stellar trajectory of a career that has seen her acquire iconic status through the near mythical attention to detail she puts into her work.

For “Sophie’s Choice” she learnt to speak Polish so well that many locals believed she was a Pole; for “Music of the Heart,” she learned to play the violin, practicing six hours each day for eight weeks, for “A Cry in the Dark” she perfected an Australian twang.

“If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won’t even try,” Streep says.

The technical mastery of her craft has sometimes divided Hollywood. Bette Davis wrote Streep a letter before her death praising her as America’s finest actress; Katharine Hepburn once described Streep as her least favorite.

Born Mary Louise Streep in June 1949 to a New Jersey pharmaceutical executive and a commercial artist mother, Streep went to an exclusive school where she became a cheerleader and began acting in plays.