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Meryl Streep Uses Carrie Fisher's Words to Celebrate the Arts and Diversity in Hollywood
"Take your broken heart. Make it into art," the actress quoted her late friend.
Meryl Streep was awarded the 2017 Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Golden Globe Awards Sunday night, and she used her platform to share her hopes for the U.S. as a new president is inaugurated later this month.
"You and all of us really in this room belong to the most vilified segments of American society right now. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press," Meryl opened her speech, referring to a similar sentiment expressed by Hugh Laurie when he won the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television.
Meryl pointed out that Hollywood is made up of talented individuals from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds, from Viola Davis to Sarah Jessica Parker to Natalie Portman to Ruth Negga to Ryan Gosling to Dev Patel. "Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, so if you kick 'em all out you'll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts," the multiple Golden Globe and Academy Award-winning actress said to a round of applause.
Meryl implied that President-elect Donald Trump's headline-grabbing mocking of a reporter with a disability was the "one performance this year that stunned me." "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," she said.
The actress warned that "disrespect invites disrespect" and "violence incites violence." She also asked the press to continue to hold those in power accountable in the future.
Meryl ended her speech with some words of wisdom from her late friend Carrie Fisher, whose memorial she recently attended. "We should all be very proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight. As my friend the dear departed Princess Leia said once," Meryl said. "'Take your broken heart. Make it into art.'"
When Chris Pine later took the stage to introduce the Golden Globe-nominated film Hell or High Water, he thanked Meryl for her message of empathy and called it "the best message of tonight."
Watch Meryl discuss her career in this throwback moment from Inside the Actors Studio, below.
