Veteran actress uses platform to defend Hollywood against charges of elitism and exhorts people in the performing arts to remain resilient and proactive in the face of the Trump kind of intolerance
The sunny musical la la land may have danced its way to a Golden Globes record Sunday night but the film’s seven accolades were a mere sideshow to the eloquence of honouree Meryl Streep, whose speech encapsulated the evening’s prevailing themes of hope, inclusivity and action over anger about the imminent presidency of Donald Trump. Accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 74th Golden Globe Awards, she quickly turned the spotlight away from herself and on to President-elect Donald Trump. Without mentioning Trump by name, Streep called out the Republican’s “performance” on the campaign trail in which he flailed his arms and appeared to mock a disabled New York Times reporter. She said Trump’s actions “kind of broke my heart.”
Streep, who was a passionate supporter of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, used her platform both to defend Hollywood against charges of elitism and to call for people in the performing arts to remain resilient and proactive in the face of intolerance. Excerpts:
“Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press, just to pick up on what Hugh laurie said. You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the Press.
“But who are weIJ And what is Hollywood anywayIJ It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Veneto, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificatesIJ And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in — no — in Ireland, I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in london, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. 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.
“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 hook in my heart not because it was good....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....It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
“Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use definition to bully others, we all lose. OK. Go on with that thing. OK. This brings me to the Press. We need the principal Press to hold power to account to call them on the carpet for every outrage.
“That’s why our founders enshrined the Press and its freedom in our 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 are going to need them going forward and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.
“Once when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something, Tommy lee Jones said to me, ‘Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actorIJ’ 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 very proud of the work Hollywood honours here tonight. As my friend, the dear departed Princess leia, said to me once, ‘Take your broken heart. Make it into art.’ Thank you, friend.”
Streep’s remarks drew a backlash from Trump conservatives, even from Trump critic Meghan McCain, who tweeted that Streep’s speech was “why Trump won.” She added that “if people in Hollywood don’t start recognising why and how — you will help him get re-elected.”