Why did Meryl Streep refuse her first Emmy award?
Having been dazzled by Robert De Niro’s performance in Taxi Driver, Meryl Streep was pursuing her acting career with renewed vigour when she bagged a role in 1977’s Julia. The following year, things started moving at an unprecedented rate, with the actor receiving her first Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter and an Emmy award for her performance in the 1978 TV series Holocaust. Except, of course, she didn’t accept it.
Holocaust traces one of the darkest moments in European history from two vastly different perspectives: that of the Jewish Weiss family and the Christian Dorf family. Streep plays Inga, a Christian woman married to Karl, an artist descended from a long line of ethnic German Jews. The four-part series depicts some of the most harrowing events of the Holocaust, including Kristallnacht, the construction of Jewish ghettos and the use of gas chambers in death camps such as Auschwitz.
The programme won several prestigious television awards and laid the foundation for Streep’s career. Her performance impressed the critics and won her the award for ‘Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series’. Ultimately, however, she refused to accept the award. When asked why she said: “I don’t think performances should be taken out of context and put up against each other for awards.”
If you think that sound’s quite a vague reason to turn down one of the most coveted TV awards going, then that makes two of us. Let’s not forget that Streep has won more Golden Globes than any other actor. So why did she refuse the prize? It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s possible that a lingering sense of guilt informed her decision. After all, she’d only accepted the role for financial gain. “I did it for the money,” she told Horizon. “I need it very badly, and I make no bones about that.”
The role bought Streep money and fame, something she found uncomfortable considering the series’ subject matter. “The other day, I was riding my bike through Chelsea when these four guys in a Volkswagen started yelling at me out of the window, ‘Hey, Holocaust, hey, Holocaust!’ Can you imagine? It’s absurd that that episode in history can be reduced to people screaming out of car windows at an actress,” she said.
That guilt may have been further compounded when Holocaust was criticised in The New York Times by survivor and activist Elie Wiesel, who described it as “Untrue, offensive, cheap: As a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived.” It’s possible, therefore, that Streep’s refusal to accept the Emmy was also an attempt to separate herself from a series that looked set to age very badly indeed.
You can watch a clip of Streep’s performance in Holocaust below.
