Meryl Streep, in the Princess of Asturias: “Empathy is the beating heart of an actor”

2023-10-20 21:10:45

Princess of Asturias Awards

Updated Friday, October 20, 2023 – 21:10

The actress passionately defends the virtue of her job of recognizing the other and feeling with them and, in her own way, portrays the spirit of almost all the interventions of the ceremony under the shadow of the war in the Middle East

Empathy, says the RAE, is the ability to identify with someone and share your feelings. He empathizes her, he says Meryl Streep, It is “the beating heart of an actor’s gift.” Pretty. The two sentences, basically, say the same thing. It’s hard to realize, but if you look closely it’s not difficult to conclude that everything is nothing more than a question of listening, of recognition, of education perhaps. What separates the two sentences, however, is the tone, the voice, the scenery and, much more important, the moment. Dictionaries are always there to consult or, if necessary, ignore them. The actress, on the other hand, appears from time to time and as soon as she does so she has no choice but to pay attention. She was to appear on the tribune of the Princess of Asturias Awards as a laureate in regards to the Arts and there was no remedy. Everything made sense.

Somehow, his exemplary, personal, emotional, exciting and even a little angry speech gave the key to all of the above and a good part of what came after. What did the King talk about when he referred to the need to “cooperate seriously, deeply and sincerely”, or Princess Leonor when she focused on what we can achieve “with common objectives and individual and collective effort”, or the athlete Eliud Kipchogeo Luis Pizarro (director of Drug Initiatives for Neglected Diseases)? Well, that’s it, being able to see how you should with the person in front of you, to run with him, to heal him, to –again– recognize him. What’s more, even the notes that the Communication and Humanities Prize winner left written before his death, Nuccio Order, They were nothing more than a few and very profound notes in favor of the most beautiful and difficult of “the lost causes”: equality. And what is equality if not the simplest and most elemental consequence of empathy? AND Haruki Murakami? Well, he didn’t speak, but I thought for sure.

In reality, Streep’s worst thing was simply her profession, herself. But since she wants an actress to be nothing more than all the characters she is capable of being, she ended up talking about all of them and, therefore, about all of us. She explained that her work is nothing more than providing the viewer with a feeling that is necessarily foreign: “the pain and joy of another person.” And that is why she has always tried to distance herself as much as possible, despite criticism, from herself, from her status as a “good middle-class girl from New Jersey.” “I have always felt driven to understand that other, counterintuitive instinct that leads us to be interested in strangers; that imaginative capacity we have to follow the stories of people outside our tribe as if they were our own.” The phrase is complicated, but it was understood perfectly as soon as a dart was allowed to its detractors: “All those accents, you know?” He was referring (you know) to the accidents of cultural appropriation and that.

Is it an imposture to want to embrace the world? the actress asked herself defiantly. And so that there would be no doubt about her intention, she looked for allies. And I found them. First Picasso who said that “imitating others is necessary, imitating oneself is pathetic.” And till Penlope Cruz He signed up for the battle, from which he remembered a somewhat strange phrase, but equally appropriate for the occasion: “You can’t live your life looking at yourself from someone else’s point of view.” What Streep wanted, ultimately, was not so much to vindicate her profession and her performance in it over so many years, but perhaps also, as her profound effect on all of us. “When we are born we identify with others, we feel a porous shared humanity”, he said and then warned against everything that makes us mature: self-protection, ideology, suspicion and distrust. And he concluded: “This is how we arrive at this sad moment in history.”

For the finale, Mery Streep, elegant and profound, left Federico García Lorca and how the poet from Granada was able to anticipate his own death in one of the characters in ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’. In the voice of the character Martirio there was a warning for the future (“a gift for us”) and, consequently, it became clear that acting is nothing more than lending the dead a voice that the living can hear. “That,” he said, “is the privilege of an actor and it is his duty.” That is his gift, his gift of making it possible for one person to feel what another feels through a different force. “Empathy,” he concluded, “can be a radical form of rapprochement and diplomacy.” And he finished: “In this increasingly hostile and uncertain world of ours, I hope we can make our other rule that is taught to all actors: the important thing is to listen.”

Then the King remembered the International Collaboration Award in 1994 to the Prime Minister of Israel Isaac Rabin and the president of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat and everything made sense. And he immediately spoke of unity, of working together, of collaboration and of commitment, and everything became even clearer. “Empathy is the beating heart of an actor’s gift.” Now yes. Say it the RAE or Meryl Streep.