Hollywood:

Another year, another nomination. Meryl Streep may joke that awards mean nothing to her anymore but after a record 15 nominations she remains the grande dame of the Oscars.

The 59-year-old Hollywood icon is in the running for her third Oscar on February 22, 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 Kate Winslet’s chances of an Oscar, and perhaps ominously, won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award last month.

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

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 honour 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.

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 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.”

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.