Meryl Streep has used her Golden Globes acceptance speech to highlight the importance of diversity in Hollywood and to criticise president-elect Donald Trump's propensity for bullying.
Streep, who was accepting the Cecil B DeMille lifetime achievement award, pinpointed the diverse backgrounds of some of the 2017 Golden Globes nominees.
"Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio," she said.
"Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy and Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem – where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in Ireland and she’s here nominated for playing a small town girl from Virginia.
"Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.
"So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kicked ‘em all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mix martial arts - which are not the arts."
In praising the "many, many, many powerful performances this year" that had attracted nomination, Streep discussed what she described as a performance "that stunned me, that sank its hooks into my heart, not because it was good - there was nothing good about it, but it was effective and it did its job".
"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, in power and the capacity to fight back," she said.
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It was clearly an attack on Mr Trump's impersonation of a disabled reporter during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, but Streep never mentioned him by name or even by his party, focusing instead on the consequences of his actions.
"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.
"And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modelled by someone with a 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.
"Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose."
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In rounding out her powerful speech, Streep focused on the need for "a principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage".
"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 going to need them going forward - and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth," she said.
