Two-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, continuing her sweep through awards season last Tuesday by picking up a Golden Bear lifetime achievement prize at the Berlin film festival, confessed she might be overrated.

Streep told reporters ahead of a gala screening of her Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady for which she is expected to bag her third Academy Award, that she felt her peers’ level of acting had soared in recent years.

Asked whether the hype around the woman frequently called the world’s top actress might just be exaggerated, the 62-year-old said incredulously: “Yeah. Of course. Of course.”

“I do think that the level of acting in general – everybody talks about the golden age of Hollywood but I really think that the level of acting now is higher, deeper, more daring, more adventurous and (deeply) felt and edgy,” she said.

Asked whose work might be on a par with her own best roles, she quipped, “Oh there are only 180.

“This year, particularly for women, there have been so many wonderful performances, many of them not even nominated, for instance our co-star OliviaColman in a film called Tyrannosaur which is absolutely breathtaking and she has not been recognised for it,” she said.

Colman played Thatcher’s daughter Carol in The Iron Lady.

“Anna Paquin made a film called Margaret that very few people have seen. Again, in any other year, it would have won every single award,” Streep said.

Ahead of the award presentation, Streep gave a rollicking press conference where she accepted a bouquet of white roses from an Austrian journalist for Valentine’s Day and thanked him with a peck on the cheek.

And a Russian journalist gave her a hand-painted matryoshka doll depicting her in three of her roles including The Devil Wears Prada and The Iron Lady.