HOLLYWOOD — Meryl Streep loves to tell the story about how one learns to be king. It dates to her days at Yale Drama School, when the instructor asked the students how to portray a monarch. "And everybody said, 'Oh, you are assertive,' and people would say, 'Oh, you speak in a slightly deeper voice.' And the teacher said, 'Wrong. The way to be king is to have everybody in the room quiet when you come in.' The atmosphere changes. It's all up to everybody else to make you king. I thought that was really powerful information."

It's hard not to think of that story after meeting Streep, perhaps the reigning queen of American movies, who in the [ast several years has had an unexpected career renaissance — at 59 — playing women who make the DNA of people who encounter her flutter and mutate.

Now, after almost 30 years of being perennially more admired than beloved, the double Oscar winner has been connecting defiantly with the masses, first with her turn as the malevolent but unexpectedly vulnerable fashionatrix in "The Devil Wears Prada," and then as the single mother singing "Dancing Queen" in the ABBA musical "Mamma Mia!," which has raked in close to $600 million worldwide.

A recent afternoon found her squashed between round-table interviews and photo sessions for "Doubt," about the 1964 mano a mano between a nun (Streep) and a popular priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) she suspects of molesting a student, although there is no direct evidence.

She is dressed in jeans, an oversized olive shirt, with large wooden beads, which she fingers repeatedly when she's not brushing her blond wispy hair behind her ears. Large glasses perch on her nose but can't quite obscure her luminous complexion, the fine points of her famed cheekbones and the faintest of smile lines around her eyes.

Mostly, Streep, who lives in Connecticut and New York, seems gleeful about her professional resurgence, which she says was completely unexpected, and she's not quite sure how it happened. "I don't make anything happen. I sit at home and wait for the phone to ring. Really," she says. "Why these opportunities are coming up has less to do with me than all the things I don't understand about how decisions are made here."

Still, she notes that three of the past four movies she has made (including her upcoming untitled Nancy Meyers film) were directed by women, and "The Devil Wears Prada" and "Mamma Mia!" were championed by female movie executives and producers.

The last time Streep won an Oscar was back in pre-history (1983, for "Sophie's Choice"), when Ronald Reagan was president. Since then, she has been to the ceremony 10 times as a nominee, including for "Out of Africa," "Ironweed" and "Adaptation."

"Doubt" is the kind of movie that could instigate another trip to the red carpet. In the first scene, Streep's character, Sister Aloysius, is seen striding down the aisle during a church sermon, stridently imposing order on wayward parishioners, mostly children.

Sister Aloysius is not meant to be initially sympathetic, and indeed, that's part of the point of John Patrick Shanley's film, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Sister Aloysius is a disciplinarian, a seeming killjoy in a battle with the popular, empathetic priest bent on making the church more accessible, more modern. Yet she's also a relatively powerless woman fighting against the tide of ingrained patriarchy and occasional misogyny of this particular church. And she's carrying out a private crusade against Hoffman's character, based primarily on her intuition.

"My friend Gavin de Becker (the security consultant) wrote a book called 'The Gift of Fear.' It was about women's intuition, and it was about ... just basically saying if you sense that something's off, if you feel unsafe, you probably are on some level. You're not paranoid; you're probably right," she says. "We're animals. We smell it. We smell danger, and I think that Sister Aloysius senses something whether it's from something she knows deep, deep in her past or what it is. She's seen this before."

Of course, this is Streep's view — not necessarily the viewpoint of the author. "Doubt" is inherent in every aspect of this joust over faith and authority, and since the play appeared on Broadway, audiences have debated whether the priest is guilty or not.

Cherry Jones famously played the part on stage, but Shanley explained that when making the film, he wanted to make the experience his own, not simply repeat what stage director Doug Hughes had done. And Streep was perhaps the obvious choice.

In fact, although he marveled at her diligence and her facility in running the crescendo of human emotion, it was not until a day of reshoots when he finally glimpsed Streep's doubts, the uncertainty that often accompanies great artistry. "I saw suddenly her vulnerability about the role, how deeply she cared, how worried she was that we got it. She was like a young girl, very vulnerable and very shaky."