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 postmodern thematic binaries produced within the novel's content. Because of its prominence since publication, the novel has received a variety of different academic re-examinations in light of numerous critical and thematic approaches. Some of the most popular concerns for the novel are its discussion of gender, especially questioning "Is the novel a feminist novel?", its engagement with metafictional and metahistorical concepts and its treatment of science and religion. The novel creates a number of binaries between men and women. Michelle Phillips Buchberger argues that "The French Lieutenant's Woman," along with Fowles two earlier novels "The Collector" (1963) and "The Magus"