NEW YORK: Oscar-winning actor Robert de Niro issued an expletive-laden denunciation of US President Donald Trump during the live television broadcast of the Tony Awards ceremony on Sunday.
De Niro appeared on stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall to introduce rocker and Tony Awards performer Bruce Springsteen.
“I’m gonna say one thing. F*** Trump,” De Niro said, without any preamble.
With the audience of theater actors, directors and producers shrieking and rising to their feet in applause, De Niro said: “It’s no longer down with Trump. It’s f*** Trump.”
He did not elaborate on his comment and switched immediately to a prepared introduction of Springsteen.
“Bruce, you can rock the house like nobody else,” De Niro said. “And even more important in these perilous times, you rock the vote, always fighting for, in your own words, Truth, transparency, and integrity in government. Boy, do we need that now.”
The expletive, known as the F-bomb, was bleeped by the CBS network for millions of television watchers at home.
However, it was heard by those in the audience and journalists covering the awards show, which honors the best of Broadway theater, and it quickly became the top trending item on Twitter.
De Niro is one of the most respected actors in the United States with two Oscar wins for “Raging Bull” and “The Godfather: Part II.”
“Mr. De Niro’s comments were unscripted and unexpected,” CBS said in a statement. “The offensive language was deleted from the broadcast.”
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
De Niro, a noted liberal, has been increasingly critical of Trump, a Republican, at smaller showbusiness events, but none have the high profile and audience of the Tony Awards.
The Tony Awards show was seen by some six million Americans last year.
Robert De Niro uses F-bomb against Trump on live Tony Awards broadcast
Robert De Niro uses F-bomb against Trump on live Tony Awards broadcast
‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance
PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.
In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.
For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.
There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.
"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.
"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."
The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.
It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.
Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."
And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.
"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."
