At the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, held on May 15 the veteran actress Meryl Streep was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or. The Oscar winner got teary-eyed as she was received by the audience with a thunderous, two-minute standing ovation. She became emotional before delivering a heartfelt speech reflecting on her decades-long career, as well as talked on the famous shampoo scene with co-star Robert Redford in her classic film Out of Africa (1985).
During the onstage conversation, the 74-year-old confessed that she didn’t want the intimate scene to end. “It’s a sex scene in a way because it’s so intimate. We’ve seen so many scenes of people fucking, but we don’t see that loving touch, that care,” Meryl said. Going on the nostalgic lane, she recalled that filming that scene wasn’t very pleasant as they were shooting in the river with a hippopotamus right above it. The warning given by the production team regarding the potentially dangerous animals made Robust so nervous, that he couldn’t shampoo her hair perfectly, saying “It was not good”. She went on to reveal that her longtime hair and makeup artist Roy Hellund helped her co-star do the same by sharing a few pointers. Robert’s game improved so significantly that by the fifth-take she was in love and didn’t want it to end that day, despite the hippos.
She also recalled the last time she was at Cannes, saying, “I was already a mother of three, I was about to turn 40 and I thought that my career was over. That was not an unrealistic expectation for actresses at that time, and the only reason that I’m here tonight and that it continued is because of the very gifted artists with whom I’ve worked.