Ellen DeGeneres praised the "power of television" as she accepted the Carol Burnett Award at the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday (05.01.20).

Ellen DeGeneres

Ellen DeGeneres

The 61-year-old actress became the second person to take the special accolade and admitted she loves nothing more than making people feel good and inspiring them to help others.

She said: "All I ever wanted to do was make people feel good and laugh and there's not greater feeling than when someone tells me I've made their day better with my show or that I've helped them get through a sickness or a hard time with their lives.

"The power of television for me is not that people watch my show, but that they watch my show and then they're inspired to go out and do the same thing in their own lives.

"They make people laugh or be kind or help someone that's less fortunate than themselves and that is the power of television and I'm so, so grateful to be a part of it."

The 'Finding Dory' star - who joked she could speak for as long as she wanted because she was receiving a special award - recalled her birth in rainy New Orleans and added: ""Before I knew it I had a successful sitcom and I came out and then I lost that sitcom and then I got another sitcom, then I lost that sitcom, too.

"Then I got to do something that I had never been able to do before and that is make my own whiskey and after that I got my own talk show and I was able to be myself and that was 17 years ago."

Ellen was presented with the award by Kate McKinnon, who gave a touching introduction in which she recalled how the talk show host's own coming out made her feel like she still had a "shot" at making it in Hollywood.

She said: "The only thing that made it less scary was seeing Ellen on TV. She really risked her entire life and her entire career in order to tell the truth and she suffered greatly for it.

"Of course attitudes change, but only because brave people like Ellen jump into the fire to make them change and if I hadn't seen her on TV, I would have thought, 'I could never be on TV. They don't let LGBTQ people on TV.'

"And more than that I would've gone on thinking that I was an alien and that maybe I didn't even have a right to be here, so thank you Ellen for giving me a shot."

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