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 French Lieutenant's Woman into English. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the narrator identifies the novel's protagonist as Sarah Woodruff, the "Woman" of the title, also known as "Tragedy" and as "The French Lieutenant's Whore". She lives in the coastal town of Lyme Regis as a disgraced woman, supposedly abandoned by a French ship's officer named Varguennes who had returned to France and married. She spends some of her limited free time on The Cobb, a stone jetty where she stares out to sea. One day, Charles Smithson, an orphaned gentleman, and Ernestina Freeman, his fiancée and a daughter of a wealthy tradesman, see