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 the function of the novel, saying Throughout the essay, Fowles describes multiple influences and issues important to the novel's development, including his debt to other authors such as Thomas Hardy. In the essay, he describes surprise that the female character Sarah had taken the primary role in the novel. Later Fowles described other influences shaping the characters development, noting that the characters and story of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" were loosely derived from Claire de Duras's 1823 novel "Ourika," which features a tragic affair between an African woman and French military man. Fowles later published a 1977 translation of "Ourika"