LEARN ENGLISH Meryl Streep You dont have to be famous with BIG subtitles
thank you all Thank You president spar
ms golden president Tillman members of
the Board of Trustees distinguished
faculty proud swelling parents and
family and gorgeous class of 2010 if you
are all really really lucky and if you
continue to work super hard and you
remember your thank you notes and
everybody’s name and you follow through
on every task that’s asked of you and
also somehow anticipate problems before
they even arise and you somehow sidestep
disaster and score big if you get great
scores on your L SATs or M sets or
ersatz or whatever and you get into your
dream grad school or internship which
then leads to a super job with a
paycheck commensurate with the
responsibilities of leadership or if you
somehow get that documentary edited on a
shoestring budget budget and then it’s
accepted at Sundance and then maybe it
wins Sundance and then you go on to be
nominated for an Oscar and then you win
the Oscar or if that money making
website that you’ve designed with your
friends somehow suddenly attracts
investors and advertisers and becomes
the go-to site for whatever it is you’re
selling blogging sharing or net casting
and success shining hoped for but never
really anticipated success comes your
way I guarantee you someone you know or
love will come to you and say will you
address the graduates at my
[Applause]
yeah
and you’ll say yeah sure when is it May
2010 2010 yeah that’s sure that’s months
away and then the nightmare begins
the nightmare we’ve all had and I want
to assure you you will continue to have
even after graduation forty years after
graduation about a week before the due
date you wake up in the middle of night
oh I have a paper due and I haven’t done
the reading oh my god
if you have been touched by the success
fairy people think you know why people
[Laughter]
think success breeds enlightenment and
you are duty-bound to spread it around
like manure fertilize those young minds
let them in on the secret what is it
that you know that no one else knows the
self-examination begins one looks inward
one opens an interior door cobwebs black
the lights bulb bulbs burned out the
airless dank refrigerator of an insanely
over scheduled unexamined life that
usually just gets takeout where is my
writer friend Anna Quindlen when I need
on another book tour
[Laughter]
hello I’m Meryl Streep
oh and today class of 2010 I am really I
am very honored and I am humbled to be
asked to pass on tips and inspiration to
you for achieving success in this next
part of your lives president’s far when
I when I consider the other
distinguished medal recipients and the
venerable Board of Trustees the many
accomplished faculty and family members
people who’ve actually done things
produced things while I have pretended
to do things I can think of about 3,800
people who should have been on this list
before me and you know since my my
success has depended wholly on my
putting things over on people so I’m not
sure the parents really think I’m that
great a role model anyway I am however
an expert in pretending to be an expert
in various areas so just randomly like
everything else in this speech I am or I
was an expert in kissing on stage and on
screen how did I prepare for this
well most of my preparation for this was
took place at my suburban high school
rather behind my suburban high school in
New Jersey one is obliged to do a great
deal of kissing in my line of work air
kissing ass kissing kissing up and of
course actual kissing much like hookers
actors have to do it with people we may
not like or even know we may have to do
it with friends which is believe it or
not particularly awkward for people of
my generation it’s awkward my other
areas of fo expertise river rafting
miming the effects of radiation
poisoning knowing which shoes go with
which bag coffee plantation in Polish
German French Italian that’s Iowa
tallien from the Bridges of Madison
County bit of a brogue bit of the Bronx
Aramaic kiddush Irish clog dancing
cooking singing riding horses knitting
playing the violin and simulating steamy
sexual encounters these are some of the
areas in which I have pretended quite
proficiently to be successful or the
other way around as have many women here
I’m sure
[Music]
women I feel I can say this
authoritative Lee especially at Barnard
where they can’t hear us what am I
talking about they professionally can’t
hear us women are better at acting than
men why because we have to be if
successfully convincing someone bigger
than you are of something he doesn’t
want to know is a survival skill this is
how women have survived through the
millennia pretending is not just play
pretending is imagined possibility
pretending or acting is a very valuable
life skill and we all do it all the time
we don’t want to be caught doing it but
nevertheless it’s part of the adaptation
of our species we we change who we are
to fit the exigencies of our time and
not just strategically or to our own
advantage
sometimes sympathetically without our
even knowing it for the betterment of
the whole group I remember very clearly
my own first conscious attempt at acting
I was six
placing my mother’s half slip over my
head in preparation to play the Virgin
Mary in our living room
as I swaddled my Betsy wetsy doll
I felt quieted holy actually and my
transfigured face and very changed
demeanor captured on super 8 by my dad
pulled my little brother’s hairy for
playing Joseph and Dana to a barnyard
animal into the trance they they they
were actually pulled into this little
nativity scene by the the intensity of
my focus in a way that my usual
technique for getting them to do what I
want yelling at them never ever would
have achieved and I learned something on
that day later when I was 9 I remember
taking my mother’s eyebrow pencil and
carefully drawing lines all over my face
replicating the wrinkles that I had
memorized on the face of my grandmother
whom I adored I made my mother take my
picture and I look at it now of course I
look like myself now and my grandmother
then but I really do remember in my
bones how how it was possible on that
day to feel her age i stooped I felt
weighted down but cheerful you know I
felt like her empathy is at the heart of
the actor’s art and in high school
another form of acting took hold of me I
wanted to learn how to be appealing so I
studied the character I imagined I
wanted to be that of the generically
pretty high school girl I researched her
deeply
that is to say shallowly in vogue and 17
and Mademoiselle magazines I tried to
imitate her hair
her lipstick her lashes the clothes of
the lie some beautiful generically
appealing highschool girls that I saw in
those pages I ate an apple a day period
i proc cited my hair I earned it
straight I demanded brand-name clothes
my mother shut me down on that one but I
did I worked harder on this
characterization really than any anyone
that I think I’ve ever done since I
worked on my giggle I I lightened it
because I liked it when it kind of went
up at the end because I thought it
sounded childlike and and cute this was
all about appealing to boys and at the
same time being accepted by the girls is
very tricky negotiation often success in
one area precludes succeeding in the
other and along with all of my exterior
choices I worked on what my what actors
call my interior adjustment I adjusted
my natural temperament which attended
ten tends to be slightly bossy little
opinionated loud little loud full of
pronouncements and high spirits and i
willfully cultivated softness
agreeableness breezy natural sort of
sweetness even a shyness if you will
which was very very very very very
effective on the boys but the girls
didn’t buy it they didn’t like me
they sniffed it out the acting and they
were probably right but I was I was
committed this was absolutely not a
cynical exercise this was a vestige of
survival courtship skill I was
developing and I reached a point senior
year when my adjustment felt like me I
had actually convinced myself that I was
this person and she me pretty talented
but not stuck-up you know a girl who
laughed a lot at every stupid thing
every boy said and who lowered her eyes
at the right moment and deferred who
learned to defer when the boys took over
the conversation I really remember this
so clearly and I could tell it was
working I was much less annoying to the
guys than I had been they liked me
better and I liked that this was
conscious but it was at the same time
motivated and fully fully felt this was
real real acting I got to Vassar which
forty-three years ago was a single sex
institution like all the colleges and
what they called the Seven Sisters the
female Ivy League and I made some very
quick but lifelong and challenging
friends and with their help outside of
any competition for boys my brain woke
up
I got up and I got outside myself and I
I found myself again I didn’t have to
pretend I could be goofy vehement
aggressive and slovenly and open and
funny and tough and my friends let me I
didn’t wash my hair for three weeks once
they accepted me like The Velveteen
Rabbit I became real instead of an
imaginary stuffed bunny but I stuck
piled that character from high school
and I breathed life into her again some
years later as Linda in The Deer Hunter
that was probably not one of you
graduates who has ever seen this film
but The Deer Hunter it it won Best
Picture in 1978 Robert De Niro Chris
Walken not funny at all and I played
Linda a small-town girl from a
working-class background a lovely quiet
hapless girl who waited for the boys she
loved to come back from the war in
Vietnam often men my age
President Clinton by the way when I met
him said men my age mentioned that
character as their favorite of all the
women I’ve played
and I have my own secret understanding
of why that is and it confirms every
decision I made in high school this is
not to denigrate that girl by the way or
the men who are drawn to her in any way
because she’s still part of me and I’m
part of her she wasn’t acting but she
was just behaving in a way that cowed
girls submissive girls beaten up girls
with very few ways out have behaved
forever and still do in many worlds now
in a measure of how much the world has
changed the character most men mention
as their favorite is Miranda Priestly
the beleaguered totalitarian US at the
head of runway magazine Devil Wears
Prada to my mind this represents such an
optimistic shift they relate to Miranda
they wanted to date Linda they felt
sorry for Linda but they feel like
Miranda they can relate to her issues
the high standards she sets for herself
and others
the thankless nough subtly der ship
position that nobody understands me
thing the loneliness they stand outside
one character and they pity her and they
kind of fall in love with her but they
look through the eyes of this other
character this is a huge deal because as
people in the movie business know the
absolute hardest thing in the whole
world is to persuade a straight male
audience to identify with a woman
protagonist to feel themselves embodied
by her this more than any other factor
explains why we get the movies we get
and the paucity of roles where women
drive the film
it’s much
it’s much easier for the female audience
because we were all brought up grown up
identifying with male characters from
Shakespeare to Salinger we have less
trouble following Hamlet’s dilemma
viscerally or Romeo’s or Tibbles or Huck
Finn or Peter Pan I remember holding
that sword up to hook I felt like him
but it is much much much harder for
heterosexual boys to be able to identify
with Juliet or Desdemona or Wendy in
Peter Pan or Joe in Little Women or the
little mermaid or Pocahontas why I don’t
know but it just is there has always
been a resistance to imaginatively
assume a persona if that persona is a
sheen the things are changing now and
it’s in your generation that we’re
seeing this men are adapting about time
they are adapting consciously and also
without realizing it for the better of
the whole group they’re changing their
deepest prejudices to accept and to
regard as normal things that their
fathers their fathers would have found
very very difficult and their
grandfathers would have aboard and the
door into this emotional shift is
empathy as young said emotion is the
chief source of becoming conscious there
can be no transforming of lightness into
dark of apathy into movement without
emotion or as Leonard Cohen says pay
attention to the cracks because that’s
where the light gets in you young women
of Barnard have not had to squeeze
yourselves into the corset of being cute
or to muffle your opinions but then you
haven’t left campus yet I just came just
kidding
you have had you what you have had is
the privilege of a very specific
education you are people that may be
able to draw on a completely different
perspective to imagine to imagine a
different possibility than women and men
who went to co-ed schools how this
difference is going to really serve you
it’s it’s hard to quantify now you may
may take you 40 years like it did me to
look back and analyze your advantage but
today is about looking forward into a
world where so-called women’s issues
human issues of gender inequality live
at the very crux of the global problems
everyone suffers from poverty to the age
crisis the rise in violent
fundamentalist hunters human trafficking
and human rights abuses and you’re going
to have the
opportunity and the obligation by virtue
of your provenance to speed progress in
all these areas and this is a place
where even though the need is very great
the news is - this is your time and it
feels normal to you but really there is
no normal
there’s only change and resistance to it
and then more change never before in the
history of our country have most of the
advanced degrees been awarded to women
but now they are since the dawn of man
it’s hardly more than a hundred years
since we were even allowed into these
buildings except to clean them but soon
most of the law and medical degrees will
probably also go to women around the
world poor women now own property who
used to be property and according to the
Economist magazine for the last two
decades the increase in female
employment in the rich world has been
the main driving force of growth those
women have contributed more to global
GDP growth than have either new
technology or the new giants India or
China cracks in the ceiling cracks in
the door cracks in the court and on the
Senate floor
you know I gave a speech at Vassar 27
years ago it was a really big hit
everybody loved it really Tom Brokaw
said it was the very best commencement
speech he had ever heard and of course I
believed this and you know it was much
much easier to construct than this one
it it came out pretty easily because
back then I knew so much I was a new
mother I had a and I had an account I
had to I had two Academy Awards and it
was all you know coming together so
nicely I was smart and I understood
boilerplate and what sounded good and
because I’d been on the squad in high
school earnest full throated
cheerleading was my specialty so that’s
what I did but now I feel like I know
about one sixteenth of what that young
woman knew things don’t seem as certain
today
now I’m sixty I have four adult children
who are all facing the same challenges
that you are how it makes things tough
for your family and whether being famous
matters really one bit in the end and
the whole flux of time I know I was
invited here because of how famous I am
and how many awards I’ve won and and
while I am I am overweening ly proud of
the work that I believe me did not do on
my own I can assure you that awards have
very little bearing on my own personal
happiness my own sense of well-being and
purpose in the world
that comes from studying the world
feelingly with empathy in my work it it
comes from staying alert and alive and
involved in the lives of the people that
I love and the people in the wider world
who need my help no matter what you see
me or hear me saying when I’m on your TV
holding a statuette and spewing that’s
acting being a celebrity has taught me
to hide but being an actor has opened my
soul
being here today has forced me to look
around inside there for something useful
that I can share with you and I’m I’m
really grateful that you gave me the
chance you know you don’t have to be
famous you just have to make your mother
and father proud of you and you already
have Bravo to your congratulations
[Applause]
you