Actress Meryl Streep recently was honoured at the 'Golden Globes' awards with the Cecil B. DeMille Award. The actress used this opportunity to call out the President elect, Donald Trump for mocking a disabled New York Times reporter.
Meryl Streep, who had damaged her vocal chords took to the platform to talk about the room which was filled with “the most vilified segments in American society right now: Hollywood, foreigners, and the press.” While she thanked the 'Hollywood Foreign Press' for the honour, she asked “What is Hollywood, anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places.”
She called out the top actors and actresses and recalled their roots. She said, “
Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
It was then the veteran actress raised the topic of Trump. She recalled about this one particular incident when Trump belittled a disabled journalist. “There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart," lamented Streep. "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,” continued the actress.
Though Streep did not address the president-elect by name, she urged the 'well-heeled' Hollywood Foreign Press and viewers to defend the media. She requested the audience to join her in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit organisation that works to protect the freedom of the press around the world.
She reminded the crème de la crème of Hollywood present in the room of "
the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy,” which is the definition of their work.
Concluding one of her best speeches, Streep quoted her late friend Carrie Fisher: “As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once: ‘
Take your broken heart, make it into art.'”
Watch the whole speech here:
