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Dear Meryl Streep,

I love you. Platonically, but truly. For your talent, and lately, for something more. In the recent films you've made, you are marching into areas so uncharted they could be overlooked. But I see what you're up to, and I salute you.

John Patrick Shanley, who wrote and directed your new film, Doubt, agrees with me. "That's really true," he said over the phone. "Her career has taken a turn into territory that no one has covered before. She's redefined what a female star can do in North America. That's pretty astonishing. She's incredibly vital. She's doing bourgeois material, she's doing sophisticated material, she's doing whatever the hell she feels like. And it's great to see."

Look at The Devil Wears Prada. You were the boss from hell, a bitch on wheels, yadda yadda, we'd seen it before in countless movies. But then you took off your makeup, slipped on a bathrobe, and woof, you were giving Anne Hathaway and every other dewy postfeminist a much-needed history lesson.

"Hate me, scorn me," your tired eyes communicated, "but I came of age before feminism, I had to fight to get here, and it cost me a lot — friends, husbands, family, all the soft, so-called female perks. This is what that looks like. This is not what it looks like for you, now, in the 21st century, so you don't realize how lucky you are. You won't thank me, but you shouldn't dismiss me."

Then you made Mamma Mia!, potentially one of the goofiest musicals of all time. It came with a big payday and a trip to Greece, but did you do it cynically? No! You sang, you danced, you whooped, you yearned, you kissed, you cried — you poured yourself into every shimmy, sigh and cackle. You were so generous with the kids in the cast, with your female co-stars, with your less-than-tuneful boyfriends. You took this sticky parfait and transformed it into something heartfelt. Which, incidentally, raked in $560-million worldwide, and ranked No. 11 at the box office in North America.

And when the number Dancing Queen rolled around, and you skipped through the island forest with a tribe of babushka- and housedress-wearing Menopausites behind you, throwing down their wash pots and rolling pins to sing with all their souls that not only do they remember what it was like to be "young and sweet, only 17," they also still are that girl, despite how they look to the mirror — well, I was moved to tears, and I don't care who knows it.

Also, let's not forget a quartet of less recent performances so nourishing, a castaway could live for weeks just by watching them: In Adaptation, The Hours, Angels in America and A Prairie Home Companion, you portrayed women who knew more, felt more, and could do more, and do it well, than any 10 people.

And now there's Doubt. I'm reading all these reviews that slag your character — Sister Aloysius, an old-school nun and middle-school principal circa 1964, who accuses Father Flynn, the cool priest played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, of bestowing inappropriate attentions upon an altar boy — calling her a witch and worse, rigid, unloving, furious, malevolent. I don't know what movie they saw, but in the one I saw, Meryl, what you do with that character is breathtaking.

Yes, Sister Aloysius at first seems hopelessly old-fashioned — she believes in penmanship and discipline, in achieving order by making the kids terrified of her. But with every passing scene, you show us more of her humanity: how she cares for the other nuns; how she listens to, and really hears, a parent; how she sees that the social changes that are coming are not all good. Halfway through, I flopped back in my seat, stunned: Suddenly, I was rethinking every stereotype I'd ever held about disapproving nuns. For the first time, I wondered what it would have been like for a woman like her, born at the turn of the last century, dedicating her life to serving, always in the shadow of powerful men. And if she saw one of those priests abusing his power, what would her recourse be in 1964?

Then there's that terrific moment where Father Flynn asks Sister Aloysius if she has ever committed a mortal sin. It was your idea that answering should make her well up with tears. "When Meryl did that in rehearsal I was very struck by it, and thought it really worked," Shanley told me. "It's not something I'd ever thought of." Wow — the guy had written the screenplay based on his play, which he'd fine-tuned for years and won a slew of prizes for, and you brought an idea that was not only something he'd never thought of, but also was, for me, an absolutely essential key to her character.

"I'm not really interested in looking at things through the prism of good and evil or right and wrong," Shanley told me. "I think life is more complicated and people are more varied than that, and the reasons that people do things are far more sophisticated than that. That's why Meryl was perfect casting. I could never specifically describe in advance what she was going to do with anything. But once she did it, it had an air of inevitability about it. She's very, very fine."

Very fine indeed. Off-screen you seem to have a new, what-the-hell honesty, too, admitting that you made a batch of less-than-fine films ( She-Devil, Death Becomes Her, The River Wild) when your four kids were little, because you "wanted to be able to come home and make dinner," as you told Entertainment Weekly. "They were a woman's choices, a mother's choices." Every working mother who's compromised her career for her kids — that is, pretty much every working mother — can relate.

You'll be 60 in June — happy half-birthday — and I can't tell you how exciting it is to watch someone at the peak of her powers create characters and participate in discourse with such honesty and intelligence. Please soldier on. Do not settle into crabby spouse or eccentric grandma roles. Continue playing complex women of every stripe. Make them the central figures in their stories, the stars of their own lives. Keep doing it with humour and ego and self-deprecation, with wrinkles, with and without makeup, with blond hair or grey. Be as much fun as you seem to be, make truckloads of money for everyone. Let it rip.

Big love,

Me.