The actors running around the pageant in Palm Springs would have been better off watching art master classes from Golden Globe winners Viola Davis and Ted Danson on Friday night.
Not only that, there was also Mary Steenburgen and Meryl Streep.
And Carol Burnett and Jane Fonda!
(Left to right) Mary Steenburgen, Ted Danson, Viola Davis and Meryl Streep at the Wilshire Backyard of the Beverly Hilton
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Streep talked about her first meeting with Davis. It was when the two women gathered at the table to read the film version of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work. Doubt.
Streep admitted that she had been feeling a little grumpy because playwright Tony Kushner had hailed Davis as his “favorite actor in the whole world.”
But then Streep sat across from Davis at the reading, with Amy Adams and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, and saw exactly what Kushner had meant. “She sat there, so still, like a silent volcano that’s just pretending to be a hill… it’s brewing underneath,” he said at the gathering at the Beverly Hilton event hosted by Golden Globes president Helen Hoehne.
Streep noted that it was Davis’ eight-minute soliloquy in Doubt “That brought us here today, that launched an already historic career.”
“Yes, we all met Viola Davis that day,” Streep shouted.
“From that day on I became, like you, part of the amazed audience that has witnessed everything she has given us since then. … Viola takes us to the church. “She collected the broken glass and blood-colored shards of a painful childhood and reassembled them in a stained glass window,” Streep said.
Looking directly at Davis, who sat surrounded by family and friends, including her husband Julius Tennon and daughter Genesis, Streep told her that “you have earned your crown,” adding that “you are a very complex woman and a pure artist, she It simply offers the truth very time. We are in awe of you, my beautiful friend, and we are grateful.”
Davis returned the compliment: “Thank you Meryl, you’re a great aunt.”
After which, he admitted to following Streep into the bathroom during the reading, “just so I could smell Meryl Streep.”
Meryl Streep and Viola Davis
Christopher Polk/Penske Media via Getty Photographs
(Left to right) Jane Fonda, Carol Burnett, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen
Michael Buckner/Penske Media via Getty Photographs
Then something extraordinary happened. Right before our eyes, Davis transformed. His physique changed and he became a combination of every August Wilson character he had played. Mother Courage A certain Ibsen, a Shakespeare tragedy, also entered there, and then she began.
“This is my testimony… I think I decided to be an actor because acting was part of a much higher journey.
“I was born into a life that just didn’t make sense. I was born in absolute poverty. I was naughty, imaginative, rebellious but I was so poor… I was born in a house with alcoholism and rage, infested with rats, bathrooms that didn’t work. I wet my bed and went to school in the same urine-soaked clothes. I just wanted to be someone. “
What he had, he said, was magic. “I was curious, and do you know what my magic was? That I could teleport, that I could get out of this worthless world and get relief from it sometimes. I could go somewhere where I could laugh, where I could have fun. And the greatest magic was that I could see people. I could see that woman on the corner standing there in freezing weather, with dirty hair and bad acne, smoking a cigarette with bloodshot eyes…no one cared…about people like that, but she was my Mona Lisa… I would say, ‘Who are you?’”
It was that curiosity, that search for honesty that allowed him to go deeper to discover a character. I remember being in New York and John Barlow, who was then a publicist for a Broadway theater, told me to drag myself to the Virginia Theater. (since renamed the August Wilson) to see Wilson’s work King Hedley II with Brian Stokes Mitchell and Leslie Uggams, but you have to be careful with an actress named Viola Davis. The production was short-lived, but Davis won the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Play.
I made sure to watch everything he did from then on. My only sadness is that UK audiences haven’t had the opportunity to witness her on stage. Yes, she’s magical on screen, but in person, live on stage, she’s electrifying, just as she was Friday night when Streep presented her with the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award.
Likewise, listening to Mary Steenburgen describe how, as a child, she had imagined a Barbie dream dating board game to find her perfect match. He wasn’t interested in the Kens. She dreamed instead of Tom, who became, she said during a funny presentation, Ted, Ted Danson.
Steenburgen was at the ceremony to honor her husband with the Carol Burnett Award, and it was fitting that Burnett was seated at the same table as Danson and Steenburgen.
I was living in New York when Health began its initial career of 11 years and I attended more than one Health party; More than I can remember.
Danson joked that his three-month-old grandson was “upstairs” watching reruns of Health. He also praised the writers and cast members of Health. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Health“, said.
Danson is still at it more than four decades later with the Netflix comedy A man insidewhich has been renewed for a second season. It was fitting and fitting that Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was in the room to help celebrate Danson.
Sarandos noted that comedy “is the hardest” to pull off and that Danson has discovered the right mix.
It was absolutely lovely to have so many of Danson’s family attend, as did many of the writers and crew he had worked with over the years.
For me, two of the attendees absolutely personified class.
In a time when shenanigans involving publicists, and God only knows who else, representing Blake Vigorous and Justin Baldoni, have gone beyond the gutter and show only the sleazy side of Hollywood, it was a delight meet Annett Wolf, who has represented Danson for four decades, and Lisa Kasteler, former Wolf-Kasteler Public Relations partners.
(LR) Lisa Kasteler and Annett Wolf on Friday night
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In fact, Kasteler arranged my first interview with Davis and I think Jonathan Rutter, the London legend, was the intermediary.
Watching Wolf, Kasteler and their colleagues on Friday night assured me that class defeats whatever devil is going on in the Vigorous and Baldoni cesspool.
The Golden Globes’ night of excellence was the first year that the special awards were separated from the main show, which is on Sunday. At first I felt conflicted, feeling that the special honors had strayed too far from the festivities of the big event.
But Friday night allowed the honorees to talk at length about their art, without people rushing to the joint in a back room of the Beverly Hilton ballroom, which is what usually happens during special awards presentations!
My sense, however, is that many others could well have benefited from being there to see these giants being feted by their peers and loved ones.
