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Meryl Streep Disses Walt Disney, Says He 'Didn't Really Like Women'
Meryl Streep called out Walt Disney for being a sexist and racist at the National Board of Review awards gala (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)
Meryl Streep, in her signature bad-ass fashion, delivered a killer speech at the National Board of Review awards gala on Tuesday, calling out Walt Disney for being sexist and anti-Semitic.
The outspoken August: Osage County actress also took some time to give props to fellow fierce female actress, Emma Thompson, describing her as a "rabid, man-eating feminist, like I am," according to Vanity Fair, which published the entire transcript of Streep's speech.
At the event in New York, Streep won the crowd over when she came out in a baseball cap that had "Prize Winner" emblazoned across it—a nod to a similar hat in Nebraska. Streep's job was to introduce her buddy Emma Thompson in the the best-actress category for her role as P.L. Travers in Saving Mr. Banks. (The film has been criticized for giving a distorted reality of what really took place between Disney and Travers.) And boy, did she deliver!
She dug her nails into Disney, citing some evidence on his sexism. Streep read a letter Disney's company sent to a young woman in 1938 that denied her a spot in their cartoonist training program, because well, she was a woman. "Some of his associates reported that Walt Disney didn’t really like women," she said.
Streep added:
Disney, who brought joy, arguably, to billions of people, was perhaps, or had some…racist proclivities. He formed and supported an anti-Semitic industry lobby. And he was certainly, on the evidence of his company’s policies, a gender bigot.
Karina Longworth writes about Streep on Vidiocry:
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Only in recent years, having become both an elder stateswoman and an unlikely box office queen, has Streep really started to come out, as it were, as the rebel that she’s always been, to put forward a new persona as a crusader against a fucked-up male-dominated status quo that’s maybe better now than it was decades ago (in Disney’s day, or the beginning of Streep’s days), but by no means snuffed out completely.
Streep's speech even comes before the Disney film Into the Woods gets released on Dec. 25, 2014, where she plays a witch in the movie. This just goes to show how nothing scares Streep—a force to be reckoned with.
Related:
Disney Gives Us (And Poor P.L. Travers) The Hard Sell In 'Saving Mr. Banks'
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