BD For Miss Ellen

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Ellen Burstyn (born December 7, 1932) is an American actress, who has worked in film, stage and television.

Burstyn's acting career began in theatre during the late 1950s and over the next ten years she appeared in several films and television series before joining the Actors Studio in 1967. She achieved recognition for her supporting role in The Last Picture Show (1971) and the lead role in The Exorcist (1973), receiving Academy Award nominations for both performances. She won the Best Actress Oscar the following year for her work in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1973). In 1975 she won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway production of Same Time, Next Year, and received a Golden Globe Award and a fourth Academy Award nomination for her performance in the 1978 film version.

She continued to work extensively during the 1980s and 1990s, and was acclaimed for her performance in the film Requiem for a Dream, for which she received several critic's awards.

In 1950, she married Bill Alexander, but they were divorced in 1957. The following year, she married Paul Roberts, with whom she adopted a boy named Jefferson in 1962; the couple was divorced the same year.

In 1964, she married fellow actor Neil Burstyn, but the union was turbulent. Neil Burstyn was schizophrenic; he would have episodes of violence, and eventually left her. He attempted to come back to her, but she rejected him, ultimately divorcing him in 1972. In her autobiography, Lessons in Becoming Myself, Burstyn revealed that he stalked her over a period of six years after she divorced him. He eventually broke into her house and raped her, but no charges were filed, as spousal rape was not yet legally a crime. He committed suicide in 1978, upon which his parents sent Burstyn a telegram stating "Congratulations, you've won another Oscar; Neil killed himself".

Burstyn affiliates herself to all religious faiths as she explains: "I am a spirit opening to the truth that lives in all of these religions”.


I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!
Ellen Burstyn

I couldn't kill a chicken, I couldn't kill a cow - I was a vegetarian too at that time - so I thought, well what is there that I could kill? I couldn't kill this and I couldn't kill that.
Ellen Burstyn

I did my famous cabbage soup diet, so I was able to do it.
Ellen Burstyn

I do like to work with young directors because it's such a difficult business that I think after directors have been around a while sometimes, not always, but sometimes their passion gets siphoned off because they get hurt.
Ellen Burstyn

I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.
Ellen Burstyn

I talked to women who lived there, to get their speech patterns and outlook on life - and how narrow that is.
Ellen Burstyn

I think that the change began... I made a film a few years ago called The Spitfire Grill, and that didn't make much money either, but it was a good film and an independent film.
Ellen Burstyn

I wanted to work on this central problem of killing. How you go about killing. Now, in the film I had to kill my children - well, I didn't want to get that far.
Ellen Burstyn

I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but as close as Brooklyn is to Manhattan, there are people who live there who have been to Manhattan maybe once or twice.
Ellen Burstyn

It's a sin to have your films not to make money.
Ellen Burstyn

It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality.
Ellen Burstyn

It's been awhile. My Oscar is getting kind of tarnished. I looked at it a couple of years ago and thought I really needed a new one.
Ellen Burstyn

Nobody would want to leave that film to go get high.
Ellen Burstyn

She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.
Ellen Burstyn

She loses 50 pounds in the film, and goes from fairly sane to totally out of her mind. So for the first part of the film I was wearing a 40 pound fat suit, which is very, very uncomfortable. But the worst part was the neck.
Ellen Burstyn

So I was at the Actor's Studio, thinking about this, and I happened to glance over to the other side of the stage and I saw the ugliest chair I have ever seen. And I thought, 'Well, I could kill that chair!'
Ellen Burstyn

The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.
Ellen Burstyn

Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that's it.
Ellen Burstyn

Then in came this script with another very low offer, and another drug addict and a depressing and difficult part to play. I thought, 'Why should I put myself through that for hardly any money?'
Ellen Burstyn

They pulled Resurrection out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed.
Ellen Burstyn