Meryl Streep is a national treasure. She’s humble, she’s honest, she’s cool and she’s funny. With her Best Actress Oscar nomination for Doubt, Streep has become the most-nominated actor in history, her fifteen nominations beating out Katherine Hepburn and Jack Nicholson’s twelve nominations each. And all of those Oscar nominations don’t even take into account her myriad nominations and wins at the Golden Globes, SAGs, Emmys and critics’ awards.

The downside to being nominated so often means that Streep loses a lot. Streep sat down with ABC’s “Nightline” to talk honestly about how it feels to not only be the most nominated actor, but the biggest loser. To sum up, Streep says it sucks.

Nearly every actor who loses on Oscar night smiles it off by saying it’s an honor just to be nominated. But Meryl Streep, who has been nominated a record 15 times but won only twice, knows more about losing than most and has revealed just how bad it really feels.

“When you lose you think ‘my work wasn’t any good’,” Streep told the ABC news program “Nightline” in an interview airing on Monday night.

“But it’s an honor to be nominated, and it is! It is,” Streep said. “But you just feel worse when you lose than you did before you got nominated.”

Feel worse? Now that’s a dose of honesty.

With a best actress Oscar nomination for her role as a vindictive nun in “Doubt,” Streep brings her total Academy Award nomination count to 15 — that’s more than any other actor, with Jack Nicholson and the late Katharine Hepburn tied at 12 Oscar nods each.

The last time Streep, 59, won an Oscar was in 1983 for the Holocaust film “Sophie’s Choice.” Her other win was in 1980 for the divorce drama “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Since then, she’s been smiling bravely from her seat on Oscar night as other actresses step up to the podium.

Streep, a noted perfectionist and master of accents, is often called the greatest living actress. But when “Nightline” interviewer Cynthia McFadden asked Streep about that, the actress called such talk “meaningless.”

From Reuters

Some of my favorite Meryl Streep roles are the ones that she wasn’t even nominated for – I’m a huge fan of Postcards from the Edge and Heartburn, both of which she was playing characters loosely based on real people. In Postcards, the character was loosely based on Carrie Fisher; in Heartburn, one the few films she did with her friend Jack Nicholson, she was playing a character loosely based on Nora Ephron to Nicholson’s Carl Bernstein.

I saw Doubt a few weeks ago and I was, per usual, blown away with Streep. I’m also a huge Phillip Seymour Hoffman fan, but even I have to admit that Streep wiped the floor with him. In one highly charged scene, you can even see Streep’s eyes turn red with emotion. Even though I’m pretty sure that Kate Winslet’s got a lock on the Oscar this year, part of me hopes that Meryl finally gets another victory after all of these years.

Meryl Streep, screenwriter John Patrick Shanley and Amy Adams are shown at a photocall for Doubt in Paris on 1/19/09. Credit: WENN