 In 1998 , Streep played an Irishwoman opposite Michael Gambon and Catherine McCormack in Pat O 'Connor 's Dancing at Lughnasa , which was entered into the Venice Film Festival of 1998 . Janet Maslin of The New York Times remarked that " Meryl Streep has made many a grand acting gesture in her career , but the way she simply peers out a window in Dancing at Lughnasa ranks with the best . Everything the viewer need know about Kate Mundy , the woman she plays here , is written on that prim , lonely face and its flabbergasted gaze " . Later that year , Streep played a cancer sufferer caught in a difficult family situation , playing the mother of Renée Zellweger and wife of William Hurt in One True Thing . The film was well received by critics . Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle declared , " After ' One True Thing ' , critics who persist in the fiction that Streep is a cold and technical actress will need to get their heads examined . She is so instinctive and natural – so thoroughly in the moment and operating on flights of inspiration – that she 's able to give us a woman who 's at once wildly idiosyncratic and utterly believable . " Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan noted that Streep 's role " is one of the least self @-@ consciously dramatic and surface showy of her career , but that she " adds a level of honesty and reality that makes [ her performance ] one of her most moving . " 
