Three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep boldly stepped up to the dais on Tuesday night to present Emma Thompson with the Best Actress Award for the Disney movie "Saving Mr. Banks" - and called out studio head Walt Disney (played by Tom Hanks in the movie) for his sexist and anti-Semitic ways.
According to Yahoo Movies, the elder stateswomen slammed Walt Disney by giving her personal opinion at the National Board of Review.
"Disney, who brought joy arguably to billions of people was, perhaps, or had some racist proclivities," Streep said. "He formed and supported an anti-Semitic industry lobbying group and he was certainly, on the evidence of his company's policies, a gender bigot."
She also read a letter written by the company in 1938 to an aspiring female animator that said, "Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that task is performed entirely by young men.
"Some of his associates reported that Walt Disney didn't really like women," Streep continued during her nine-minute speech, where she also quoted legendary animator Ward Kimball's description of his old boss: "He didn't trust women or cats."
Controversial and "dark" secrets of Disney's past are nothing new.
Recently, Andrew Romano at the Daily Beast dredged and aired dirty laundry when he wrote, "Walt was a fascist;" "Walt was an anti-Semite;" "Walt was a racist." He also claimed, "Walt was an Illuminati pedophile who liked to wear his mother's dresses and lipstick and was obsessed with the human buttocks." (None of those things, by the way, is even remotely true.)
Disney, did, however, smoke cigarettes, a "nasty habit" to which the movie alludes, Yahoo Movies reported.
Neil Gabler, author of the respected biography, "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination," wrote that while the studio honcho may have personally practiced tolerance, as a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance, he "willingly, even enthusiastically, embraced [anti-Semites] and cast his fate with them."
Streep probably didn't feel that she was taking too much of a risk, given that she's deeply involved in the Walt Disney Studios, playing the character of The Witch in the Stephen Sondheim musical "Into the Woods," which arrives in theaters over Christmas this year, Yahoo Movies reported.
