Robert De Niro was honored with the Life Achievement Award at the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG Awards) today, Monday 20, 2020.
The actor is one of Hollywood’s most notable legends and has featured in a lot of high-profile movies in his career, the latest being the award-winning Martin Scorsese biopic The Irishman (2019).
The memorable event took place at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall, Los Angeles, California, United States and was well attended by many movie stars.
De Niro joins Rita Moreno, Morgan Freeman, Debbie Reynolds, and James Earl Jones as they have all gotten the same recognition.
In his acceptance speech, the actor said that taking victory laps in the acting profession was something you didn’t indulge in because you were worried about your next project. He thanked SAG for the honor, highlighting what they had done for actors, especially in recent times when there was hostility towards unions.
There’s right, and there’s wrong, and there’s common sense, and there’s abuse of power. As a citizen, I have as much right as anybody, an actor, an athlete, a musician, anybody else, to voice my opinion. And if I have a bigger voice because of my situation, I’m going to use it whenever I see a blatant abuse of power.Robert De Niro
Fellow actor Leonardo DiCaprio who introduced De Niro stated that the veteran actor had been his role model right from the time he was a teenager and called him “elemental.”
Robert De Niro is elemental. It feels as if he’s always been here and always will be here. As the lights went down, he turned to me and said, ‘If you really want to be an actor and get into this profession, if you want to understand what great acting is, you watch that man on screen.
