At the 2017 Golden Globes award, Meryl Streep was given the Cecil B. DeMille Award, which was presented to her by Viola Davis, who won her first Golden Globe for Fences.
Both speeches invoked tears and left an impression for all to see.
Davis said to Streep: “You make me proud to be an artist. You make me feel that what I have in me, my body, my face, my age, is enough. You encapsulate that great Émile Zola quote that if you ask me as an artist what I came into this world to do, I an artist would say, I came to live out loud.”
Streep accepted the award and decided to address the audience regarding President-elect Donald Trump.
She asked what Hollywood would be without foreigners and outsiders:
“So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
She continued on:
“They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.
But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.
She also had a simple request for journalists.
We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.
One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.
As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.”
“Trump, in a brief telephone interview said he had not seen Ms. Streep’s remarks or other parts of the Globes ceremony, which were broadcast on NBC, but added that he was “not surprised” that he had come under attack from “liberal movie people,”” reported the New York Times.
On January 9th, Trump responded to the speech via his Twitter:
Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017
Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never “mocked” a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him…….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017
“groveling” when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017
Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Trump and his former campaign manager, appeared on “Fox and Friends” on Monday morning to criticize Streep for not trying to unite people. “I’m concerned that somebody with a platform like Meryl Streep is also, I think, inciting people’s worst instincts,” Conway said on the show.
