Each time this lady comes on stage, she makes sure she owns it, and the Golden Globes night was no different. Meryl Streep, who received the Cecil B DeMille Award at the awards show, had a message for Donald Trump and America. She took her time on stage to slam Trump in a moving acceptance speech, pointing out that Hollywood was made of outsiders.
And Trump soon responded to Streep via Twitter.
But Mr President, you were clearly ridiculing the disabled journalist, refresh your memory here:
But getting back to Meryl Streep’s awesomeness, the actress began her speech by saying that she had "lost her voice" and "mind sometimes earlier this year" so she would like to read from a written speech.
She echoed Hugh Laurie's comment about how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is part of "the most vilified segments in American society right now", Streep said the association was made of -- Hollywood, foreigners and the press.
But who are we and what is Hollywood, anyway? It is just a place with a bunch of people from other places.
Streep said, adding she was raised in New Jersey while Sarah Paulson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Amy Adams, Natalie Portman, Ruth Negga, Viola Davis, Dev Patel and Ryan Reynolds were all born in different places.
Where are their birth certificates? Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if you kick us all out, you’ll have nothing to watch except for football and mixed martial arts, which are not arts.Meryl Streep
The multiple award-winning actress, who is one of the most respected names in Hollywood, said the "performance" that stood out this year did not belong to an actor but to Trump when he publicly mocked a disabled reporter.
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.Meryl Streep
The actress urged the press to stand up to Trump.
"We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage... We're going to need them going forward and they're going to need us to safeguard the truth," she said of journalists.
Streep, 67, ended her speech by quoting late Carrie Fisher...
As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, ‘Take your broken heart, make it into art.’
Viola Davis presented the honour to Streep, who has won eight Golden Globes and 29 nominations.
(With inputs from PTI)
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