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 Woman Who Did of marriage by refusing to get married herself, Victoria Crosse's heroine Eurydice Williamson—"the woman who didn't"—remains faithful to her impossible husband although, during a passage from India, she meets a man who falls in love with her. Similarly, Lovett Cameron's hero is a married man who resists the temptation to stray. Another novel written in reply to Allen's work, Lucas Cleeve's "The Woman Who Wouldn't", (1895) sold well and received hostile reviews. The author said of this: "If one young girl is kept from a loveless, mistaken marriage, if one frivolous nature is checked in her career of flirtation by