The French Lieutenant's Woman (film) Award for Best Actress, and Pinter for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film intercuts the stories of two affairs. One is a Victorian period drama involving the gentleman palaeontologist Charles Smithson and the complex and troubled Sarah Woodruff, known as "the French lieutenant's woman." The other story is between actors Mike and Anna, playing the lead roles in a modern filming of the story. In both segments, Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep play the lead roles. John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman" had multiple endings, and the two parallel stories in the movie have different outcomes. In
The Public Woman The Public Woman The Public Woman () is a 1984 French drama film inspired by Dostoevsky's novel "Demons" and directed by Andrzej Żuławski, starring Valérie Kaprisky, Lambert Wilson and Francis Huster as the lead actors. The film had a total of 1,302,425 admissions in France where it was the 28th highest-grossing film of the year. An inexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoevsky's novel "Demons". The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and