Text of Meryl Streep's Cecille B. DeMille Award speech
The text of Meryl Streep's speech at the Golden Globes after accepting the Cecille B. DeMille Award, according to a transcript provided by Hollywood Foreign Press Association:
Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn.
Where are their birth certificates?
[...] 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.
[...] 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.
[...] 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.
[...] 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 kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
[...] 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, you know, we were going to 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.