Ellen Burstyn
Ellen Burstyn is an actor, born 1932.
Burstyn's run through the 1970s is one of the best any American screen actor has had: The Last Picture Show in 1971, The King of Marvin Gardens in 1972, The Exorcist in 1973, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Harry and Tonto in 1974, Same Time, Next Year in 1978. She holds an Academy Award, a Tony and two Primetime Emmys, which places her among the very few performers to complete the triple crown of acting, along with a BAFTA and a Golden Globe.
What she plays, over and over, is a woman who still wants something at an age when scripts stop writing wants for women. Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist is a working mother whose competence is suddenly worth nothing at all, and the film's terror runs through her rather than through the special effects. Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream is the harder one: a widow whose loneliness is answered by a television set and a diet doctor, and Burstyn plays the deterioration without once asking to be pitied.
Then she simply kept working. The Fountain, The Wicker Man, Barbara Bush in W., Draft Day, The Age of Adaline, a long shelf of television. Interstellar uses her for a handful of minutes and those minutes carry the emotional argument of the entire film.
Recently, Pieces of a Woman gave her a mother whose support arrives as pressure, in one long scene the whole film is built around, and she returned as Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist: Believer fifty years after the original. She is in her nineties and still being cast for what she can do rather than for what she once did.
Movies (69)
- Interstellar (2014)
- The Exorcist (1973)
- The Age of Adaline (2015)
- Requiem for a Dream (2000)
- The Fountain (2006)
- The Exorcist: Believer (2023)
- The Wicker Man (2006)
- Dying Young (1991)
- Flowers in the Attic (2014)
- Draft Day (2014)
- Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)
- Pieces of a Woman (2020)
- Unity (2015)
- Playing by Heart (1998)
- The Yards (2000)
- W. (2008)
- The Last Picture Show (1971)
- Petals on the Wind (2014)
- Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)
- Breakdown: 1975 (2025)
- When a Man Loves a Woman (1994)
- The Tale (2018)
- Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (2003)
- Lucy in the Sky (2019)
- Same Time, Next Year (1978)
- How to Make an American Quilt (1995)
- The Baby-Sitters Club (1995)
- Night of 100 Stars II (1985)
- Wiener-Dog (2016)
- Roommates (1995)
TV (12)
Where to start with Ellen Burstyn
The Exorcist is where most people will start and it holds up, but watch it as her film rather than the child's: everything frightening in it is filtered through a mother running out of expert opinions.
The performance to seek out deliberately is Requiem for a Dream. It is a hard watch and she is extraordinary in it, and no other film on this page asks as much of an actor. Do not put it on casually.
For the seventies, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is the warmest thing she made and still feels modern, The Last Picture Show is the ensemble classic, and Same Time, Next Year and Harry and Tonto are the ones worth digging out. Modern audiences know her from Interstellar, and Pieces of a Woman and The Fountain are the late-career highlights.
The seventies
Five years in which she was in more significant American films than almost anyone. The Exorcist and Alice came out within a year of each other, and she hired Scorsese for the second because she wanted a director who could handle women.
The hard films
The performances that are difficult to watch on purpose. Requiem for a Dream is the one people cite and the monologue about the red dress is the reason. The Tale and Pieces of a Woman are the recent equivalents.
The later and lighter work
The long later career, in which she turns up and quietly takes the film. Interstellar gives her about three minutes and they are the ones everyone remembers, and the ensemble pieces use her as the centre of gravity.