New nomination for Meryl Streep

Another year, another nomination. Meryl Streep may joke that awards mean nothing to her anymore but after a record 15 nominations she remains the "grande dame" of the Oscars.Â

The 59-year-old Hollywood icon is in the running for her third Oscar on Sunday, nominated as best actress for her role in the religious drama "Doubt," some 30 years after her first Academy Award nod for "The Deer Hunter."

Streep is the biggest threat to British actress Kate Winslet's chances for an Oscar, after Streep, perhaps ominously, won the Screen Actors Guild award last month.

"Even though awards mean nothing to me any more. I'm really happy," Streep joked after collecting the SAG honor.

Yet although Streep says her previous Oscar wins have given her a sense of validation, she admits that defeat on Sunday will still hurt.

"When you lose, you think my work wasn't any good. But it's an honor to be nominated, and it is! It is. But you just feel worse when you lose than you did before you got nominated," she told ABC television last month.

Streep's first Oscar win came for 1979's "Kramer vs Kramer," followed by a second for her portrayal of a Jewish concentration camp prisoner in "Sophie's Choice" in 1982.

Streep, though, has never been one to be carried away by the trappings of fame, preferring to live as anonymously as possible at her home, where she has raised her four children.

"Being famous gets in the way of a lot of things," she once told an interviewer. "My family really does come first. It always did and always will."

The graduate of prestigious Vassar College and Yale University has kept Hollywood and the media firmly at an arm's length for years.

She insists on not working during her children's school terms, spends little time with industry folk and left Los Angeles years ago and refuses to talk publicly about her personal life.

Yet the reluctance to play the celebrity game has not interfered with the stellar trajectory of a career that has seen her acquire iconic status through the near mythical attention to detail she puts into her work.

For "Sophie's Choice" she learned to speak Polish so well that many locals believed she was a Pole; for "Music of the Heart," she learned to play the violin, practicing six hours each day for eight weeks, for "A Cry in the Dark" she perfected an Australian twang.

"If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try," Streep says.

The technical mastery of her craft has sometimes divided Hollywood. Bette Davis wrote Streep a letter before her death praising her as America's finest actress; Katharine Hepburn once described Streep as her least favorite.

Born Mary Louise Streep in June 1949 to a New Jersey pharmaceutical executive and a commercial artist mother, Streep went to an exclusive school where she became a cheerleader and began acting in plays.

She continued acting at Vassar, where she studied English and drama, before winning a drama scholarship to Yale, where she graduated in 1975.

Her Broadway debut came in 1975 with "Trelawny of the Wells," for which she won rave reviews, while her film start came in 1977 with "Julia."

Her career was really launched with Woody Allen's "Manhattan" (1979), followed by a string of huge successes: "The Deer Hunter" (1978), for which she won her first Oscar nomination, "Kramer vs Kramer," "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981) and "Sophie's Choice" (1982).

She made a string of other hits including 1984's "Silkwood," "Out of Africa" (1986), 1988's "A Cry in the Dark," 1990's "Postcards from the Edge", "The Bridges of Madison County" (1995) and Music of the Heart" (1999).

The new millennium has seen no letup in Streep's output. She received Oscar nominations for 2003's "Adaptation" and has a string of other projects in the pipeline, including two political dramas "Rendition" and "Lions for Lambs."

Her astonishing versatility was highlighted by her contrasting performances in two vastly different 2008 films "Doubt" and the big-screen adaptation of the ABBA musical "Mamma Mia!"