All Hail Ellen Burstyn
The rise, fall and re-rise of a great American actress
Contemporary Ellen Burstyn is a little bit like Blythe Danner-dark.
Both had their big screen breaks in the 1970s, but while the grandmother of Goop reinvented herself in the early aughts by going three rounds with Ben Stiller and a Persian cat that flushes the toilet, Burstyn’s most recent foray into comedy finds her cozying up to Todd Solondz and an unlucky dachshund named, at least temporarily, Cancer, in the Welcome to the Dollhouse director’s latest Sundance offering, Wiener-Dog.
But the choice of role should really come as no surprise to fans of the masterful actress, who at 83 appears to have no intentions of slowing — or dumbing — down anytime soon (if for no other reason than that she cannot afford to do so). “As I read the script, I went ‘Oh, this guy is just so weird, so adorably weird,’” she told The Telegraph of her most recent director. “There’s something very kind about the way he views us silly people.”
Burstyn’s career, however, is anything but silly, even if it’s beginning is packed full of fun if long-forgotten pseudonyms: Her first regular on camera job was as a dancer billed as “Erica Dean” on The Jackie Gleason Show, while her Broadway debut in 1957’s Fair Game and subsequent regular appearances on the 1960s daytime soap opera, The Doctors, were done under the stage name “Ellen McRae.” Clearly, on screen was not the first place in which she reinvented herself.
But in 1971, the newly christened Ellen Burstyn (neé Edna Rae Gillooly — we couldn’t leave the actual birth name off the roster) landed her breakout role as Lois Farrow in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, a film Roger Ebert said “created a sensation” upon its opening, managing to somehow feel both “new and old at the same time.” The movie—which also happened to be her onscreen daughter, Cybill Shepherd’s film debut—earned Burstyn her first Academy Award nomination and kickstarted a decade of unabashed critical adoration, a remarkable feat for an actress who was the ripe old Hollywood age of (gasp!) 39 at the time.
Burstyn didn’t waste time in making the most of her newfound cachet. In 1973, she went high-class horror — and earned her second Academy Award nomination — as the mother of a daughter possessed by a now infamously head-spinning devil in The Exorcist. Geena Davis, who is starring in Fox’s TV remake of the horror classic, said recently of Burstyn’s iconic performance in the film, “You can’t get better than that.”
One year later, she took home the Oscar for her portrayal of a newly-widowed wannabe singer in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and in 1979 and 1981, she received two additional Academy Award nominations for her performances in Same Time, Next Year and Resurrection, respectively. And then… nothing.
Comparatively speaking, of course. Burstyn, who, together with Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel, is co-president of the New York Actors Studio (made mainstream famous in part thanks to James Lipton and his notorious ten little questions), certainly did not abandon her craft. Instead, she spent the ‘80s largely toiling away in generally unappreciated TV movies and miniseries, and even had a short stint headlining a sitcom of her own. (Fun fact: Before she was the inimitable Karen on Will & Grace, Megan Mullalley was Burstyn’s divorced daughter on The Ellen Burstyn Show. Broadway veteran and Jack Donaghy materfamilias Elaine Stritch also played Burstyn’s own meddling mother, making it fairly safe to say that the sitcom, whatever its faults, did not fail for lack of acting talent.)
The 90s were filled with what Burstyn, in her autobiography Lessons in Becoming Myself, called her “gray-haired old lady” roles. Highlights from this period of self-proclaimed marginalization include 1995’s The Babysitter’s Club, in which Burstyn-as-crotchety-old-neighbor tries to shut down the aforementioned babysitter’s day camp for kids (Ann M. Martin be damned), and How to Make An American Quilt, in which Burstyn-as-elderly-sage teams up with fellow cinema great Anne Bancroft to cure their granddaughter/grandniece, Winona Ryder, of a case of cold feet. (You’re welcome, tweens of 1995.) But all of that changed five years later, thanks, among other things, to amphetamines.
In 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s almost painfully graphic film about drug addiction, Burstyn seems to utterly transform into Sara Goldfarb, an isolated Coney Island widow who becomes addicted to amphetamines in the form of diet pills after she starts trying to quickly lose weight for a supposed appearance on her favorite game show. Her performance is visceral, with Burstyn applying theatrical stage acting level histrionics to an accidental pill popper, and by the end of the movie she’s gone from a stereotypical Brooklyn grandmother to a frightened, frighteningly unrecognizable woman, manically grinding her teeth while dreaming of the family that no longer surrounds her.
And it says something that in a story where we watch the likes of Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans descend from fresh young faces looking for a little side fix into varying degrees of degradation—including forced amputation and some rather humiliating sex work—that Burstyn’s performance still unequivocally takes the cake as the most brutal of them all. I dare you to watch her heart wrenchingly accurate monologue about aging alone without getting an uncomfortable lump the size of a Brooklyn apartment building in your throat, followed by the immediate need to call your own mother/hug your own children/curl into the fetal position and revert to sucking your thumb.
Burstyn initially didn’t want to take the role, telling her agent at the time that it was simply too depressing. But he thankfully convinced her to take a look at Aronofsky’s first film, Pi, before finalizing her decision, and that was all it took. “I just saw about four minutes of that and went, ‘Okay, I get it. The guy’s an artist. I’ll do it,’” she explained to New York magazine. Pair that with her subsequent Academy Award nomination for the role (her first in 20 years, which she egregiously lost to Julia Roberts and Erin Brockovich, but I digress), add in a strong supporting turn that same year as Mark Wahlberg’s mother with a heart condition in The Yards, and voila: Ellen Burstyn, 2.0 is here.
Since then, she’s lent her refined air to Barbara Bush in Oliver Stone’s W., traded in Winona for a newer teen dream costar in the form of Blake Lively and Age of Adeline, and rightfully embraced the recent golden age of television, slotting herself in nicely amongst its abundance of anti-heroes and welcoming the overall heightened intellectual currency that surrounds a cultural ascent towards “peak TV,” first appearing as the mother of Jeanne Triplehorn’s polygamist wife Barbara Henrickson on HBO’s Big Love in 2007. (Because before there was “Netflix and chill,” there was “It’s not TV, it’s HBO”; pass the popcorn.)
More recently, Burstyn treated us to a dynamite five-episode stint on Louie as the comedian’s older Hungarian neighbor, Evanka, before turning hard Texas ice queen for her Emmy-nominated turn as Claire Underwood’s (Robin Wright) steely society mom Elizabeth Hale on House of Cards.
But I won’t call it a comeback. She’s clearly been here for years.
