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Meryl Streep has been awarded the honorary Palme d’Or award at the Festival de Cannes’ Opening Ceremony. The accolade, which is shaped like a golden palm, recognises lifetime achievements and outstanding contributions to cinema.
In Cannes, and in a divine Dior haute couture white silk gown, Streep, 74, accepted the award and likened the act of looking back at her film career to “looking out the window of a bullet train, watching my youth fly into my middle age right onto where I am standing on this stage tonight. So many faces and so many places that I remember.”
But it when Streep recounted the last time she was in Cannes that the audience inside the Grand Lumière Theatre began to well up. The year was 1989 and the Oscar-winning actress was promoting Evil Angels, a film which chronicled Australia’s own Lindy Chamberlain and her nine-month-old baby Azaria.
“I was already a mother of three, I was about to turn 40 and I thought that my career was over,” Streep said. “That was not an unrealistic expectation for actresses at that time. And the only reason that I’m here tonight and that it continued is because of the very gifted artists with whom I’ve worked, including Madame La President,” she said, gesturing to jury president Greta Gerwig, who directed her in Little Women.
“[I’m] just so grateful that you haven’t gotten sick of my face and you haven’t gotten off the train,” Streep continued. “My mother, who is usually right about everything, said to me: ‘Meryl, my darling, you’ll see. It all goes so fast. So fast.’ And it has, and it does. Except for my speech, which is too long.”
The Festival de Cannes’ opening ceremony heralds the beginning of the two-week film festival. Big ticket films are premiering this season in the city including Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (with Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth), Bird (with Barry Keoghan), Kinds Of Kindness (Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe), Oh, Canada (Jacob Elordi), Emilia Perez (Selena Gomez), The Substance (Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore) and The Apprentice (Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump).
