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74th Annual Golden Globe Awards - Show

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Meryl Streep brought the 2017 Golden Globes to its knees with a rousing speech that has set the Internet ablaze.

Streep gracefully accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award, presented by Viola Davis, and used her stage to denounce Donald Trump, defend diversity in Hollywood and galvanize the press to stand united.

“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,” she said.

Without mentioning Trump by name, Streep blasted the President-elect for mocking a disabled reporter at a rally, a performance she said left her “stunned.”

“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 the moment where 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”

She added, “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out my head because it wasn’t in a movie, it was in real life. That instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everyone’s life because it gives permission for others to do the same.”

Streep then delivered this message to the press,

“We need the principal press to hold power to account, to call him them on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms 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’re gonna need them going forward and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.”

The eight-time Globe winner ended her speech with a nod to her friend, the late Carrie Fisher, who once told her, “Take your broken heart, make it into art.”

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For 2024’s iteration of MadameNoire and HelloBeautiful’s annual series Women to Know, we knew we wanted to celebrate the people who help make the joys of film and television possible. To create art is to create magic. This year, we spotlight Hollywood Executive’s changing the face of cinema.