WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama honored actor and director Clint Eastwood and singer Bob Dylan with arts awards Thursday.

The White House called Dylan "an icon of youthful rebellion and poetic sensitivity" and said Eastwood's films and performances are "essays in individuality, hard truths and the essence of what it means to be American."

"Obviously, their careers have helped to mark the landscape of American culture for decades," Obama said noting their absence from the East Room ceremony.

Others who made the evening ceremony for arts and humanities awards, though, were no less important to the nation's cultural identity.

Soprano Jessye Norman was recognized for "broadening contemporary operatic repertoire." Maya Lin earned a medal for her architecture, including the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. And Obama awarded composer John Williams a medal for music featured in films such as the "Star Wars" series and the soundtrack to the Olympics.

Obama also welcomed author and activist Elie Wiesel to accept an award for his work to educate the country on the Holocaust and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas for his efforts to expand audiences and the repertoire for contemporary music.

"Each has taken a different path to get here, each has made the most of different gifts, but all of them have reached the peaks of cultural achievement and all of them are a testament to the breadth and depth of the human spirit," Obama said.

Noting the country produced talents ranging from Mark Twain to Toni Morrison, John Philip Sousa to Louis Armstrong, Obama praised the United States' diversity.

"They bring us joy, they bring us understanding and insight, they bring us comfort in good times and perhaps especially in difficult times in our own lives and the life of our nation," he said.

The president shook hands and whispered in the ears of the medal recipients as he presented them with the awards. He helped William McNeill, author and University of Chicago professor emeritus, leave the stage.

He joked: "If you fall, I'm liable."

Others receiving medals:

• Rita Moreno, winner of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards.

• Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen.

• Milton Glaser, a designer best known for his "I Love New York" logo.

• Joseph P. Riley, Jr., mayor of Charleston, S.C., who helped build historic and cultural resources in the city.

• Frank Stella, an artist the White House called "one of the world's most innovative painters and sculptors."

• Robert A. Caro, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner known for his biographies of Robert Moses and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

• Pulitzer Prize-winner Annette Gordon-Reed, whose research unearthed President Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his slaves, including Sally Hemings.

• Historian David Levering Lewis, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of W.E.B. Du Bois.

• Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

• Philanthropist Albert H. Small, whom the White House praised "for his devotion to sharing early American manuscripts with our nation's cultural and educational institutions."

• Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the country's oldest continuously operating conservatory.

• New York's School of American Ballet, the dance program co-founded by George Balanchine based at the Lincoln Center.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Ben Stiller ditches the slapstick comedy and gets more serious in "Greenberg," a low budget drama about a man in mid-life crisis struggling to deal with painful truths about himself and his failures.

The U.S. actor best known for comedies like "Meet the Fockers" and "There's Something About Mary," and the hit "Night at the Museum" action franchise, said he enjoyed the change from more familiar fare.

"For me it was an opportunity to work with (director) Noah (Baumbach), who I was a big fan of," Stiller told reporters after a press screening Sunday at the Berlin film festival, where Greenberg is in the main competition lineup.

"It was great to be able to work in a movie that was not that other kind of film," the 44-year-old added.

Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a 40-year-old part-time New York carpenter recovering from a mental breakdown who travels to house-sit for his wealthy brother at his home high in the Hollywood Hills.

Determined to do nothing, and not feel guilty about it in bustling Los Angeles, he reunites with two old band mates who are still bitter at his decision 15 years earlier to reject an offer from a major record label.

He falls for his brother's assistant Florence, played by Greta Gerwig, but mental issues and an awareness of his own shortcomings make him unpredictable and abusive.

"I think it's a really believable path that these people are on," Stiller said of Greenberg and Florence.

Welsh actor Rhys Ifans plays Ivan, one of the band members who is overcoming a drink problem and has a son whom a self-centered Greenberg never bothered to get to know.

PAINFUL TRUTHS

Ivan tells a shocked Greenberg how others perceive him, and the two reflect on life with the bitterness of people who feel they could have done more.

"They say youth is wasted on the young," Ivan says.

"Life is wasted on people," Greenberg retorts.

Further comedy comes from the protagonist's obsession with writing letters to corporations and city officials to complain about whatever bothers him, accusing Starbucks of serving lousy coffee and American Airlines of having faulty seats.

As well as a love story, Greenberg is a movie about growing up.

"Life sort of creeps up on you," said Stiller. "I've got two kids, and kids force you to thinking outside of yourself a little bit.

"There is a feeling like you have ... your life ahead of you. Greenberg is really coming up against the fact that he doesn't. You have to accept those things and that's part of growing up."

Baumbach wrote the script with his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also appears in the movie.

The New Yorker is best known for his scripts, and was a writer on Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox."