Background
BURSTYN, Ellen was born on December 7, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, United States. Daughter of John Austin and Coriene Marie (nee Hamel) Gillooly.
BURSTYN, Ellen was born on December 7, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, United States. Daughter of John Austin and Coriene Marie (nee Hamel) Gillooly.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Dowling College. Doctor of Fine Arts (honorary), School Visual Arts.
In all of Ellen Burstyn’s best work, a desperate cheerfulness struggles with grim prospects and her battered good nature comes near to breaking down. Her finest moment is as the aging girlfriend in The King of Marvin Gardens (72, Bob Rafelson), trying not to notice that her own stepdaughter is appropriating her man. Her good spirits are listless, as if she kept going back to that dread worry. And when it is too much for her, she turns first to self-abuse, hacking off her hair, before the helpless yielding to violence in what is one of the cinema’s most understandable and distressing killings. That part is a woman whose life has been filled with struggle and compromise, and who is defiantly aware that she is nothing more magical than a pretty forty-year-old. And Edna Rae Gillooly came up the hard way too.
She worked as a waitress, a store clerk, a model, and many other things, trying to get into show business. All through the fifties, she worked under the name of Ellen McRae: on TV as a chorus girl on the Jackie Glea-son show and in The Doctors; in the theatre, in Fair Game, a Broadwav comedv; and with tiny parts in several films, including Goodbye Charlie (64, Vincente Minnelli).
She played a bigger part in Tropic of Cancer (69, Joseph Strick), but it was the talent display of The Last Picture Show (71, Peter Bogdanovich) that established her. Her frustrated wife in that movie is probably a cleverer performance than Cloris Leaehman’s (who got the supporting actress Oscar). Burstyn frets, sighs, lusts, and lies, but there is a kindness in her understanding of, and brief temptation by, the young, and a wholesome delight in her memories of “the Lion.” She was the wife in Alex in Wonderland (71, Paul Mazursky); the mother in The Exorcist (73, William Eriedkin)—a part not really accessible to humane acting; Harry and Tonto (74, Mazursky); winning her own Oscar in Alice Doesn 't Live Here Anymore (74, Martin Scorsese), a good performance in a flawed film, but far from her best work; helplessly out of her element being asked to model clothes and esoteric time schemes in Prov¬idence (77, Alain Resnais); and more removed from her roots still in A Dream of Passion (78, Jules Dassin). Same Time, Next Year (78, Robert Mulligan) was as close as she had ever come to a standard American entertainment.
In the eighties, she did what she could and what she had to do. She was cioselv associated with the Actors Studio (as spokesperson and leader), and sometimes in her movies she seemed to be too much an advocate of “acting”: very good in Resurrection (80, Daniel Petrie); The Silence of the North (81, Allan Winton King); as the convicted killer on TV in The People vs. Jean Harris (81, George Schaefer), catching Harris’s self-destructive loftiness; The Ambassador (84. J. Lee Thompson); Surviving (85, Waris Hussein); Into Thin Air (85, Roger Young); Twice in a Lifetime (85, Bud Yorkin); Act of Vengeance (86, John Mackenzie); Something in Common (86, Glenn Jordan); beautifully suburban-net-eurtained as the unwitting neighbor to spies in Pack of Lies (87, Anthony Page); Hanna’s War (88, Menahem Golan); When You Remember Me (90, Harry Winer); Dying Young (91, Joel Schumacher); and excellent in The Ce meten/ Club (93, Bill Duke).
It is hard to think of anyone who could so lower her defenses as she did in the harrowing Requiem for a Dream (00. Darren Aronofsky). But such commitment isn’t often rewarded, and Burstvn has more than her share of TV sentimentality: Getting Out (94, John Kortv); Getting Gotti (94, Young); Trick of the Eye (94, Ed Kaplan); When a Man Loves a Woman (94, Luis Mandola); The Color of Evening (94, Stephan Stafford); Roommates (95, Peter Yates); The Baby-Sitters Club (95, Melanie Me lyron); How to Make an American Quilt (95, Jocelyn Moorhouse); My Brother’s Keeper (95, Jordan); Follow the River (95, Martin Davidson); The Spitfire Grill (96, Lee David Zlotoff); Deceiver (97, Jonas and Joshua Pate); The Patron Saint of Liars (98, Stephen Gyllenhaal); Playing by Heart (98, Willard Carroll); Flash (9S, Simon VVincer); Night Ride Home (99, Jordan); The Yards (00, (ames Gray); Mermaid (00, Peter Mas- terson); Walking Across Egypt (00, Arthur Allan Seidelman); Dodson’s Journey (01, Gregg Champion); Within These Walls (01, Mike Robe); Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (02, Callie Khouri).
Member individual artists grants and policy overview panels National Endowment for the Arts, Theater Advisory Council City of New New York. Member Actors Equity Association (president 1982-1985).
Physical Characteristics: She has a round face, a little swollen, like a doll soaked in tears or straining to hold back crying.
Married William Anderson, 1950 (divorced 1955). Married Paul Roberts, 1957 (divorced 1959). Married Neil Burstyn, 1960 (divorced 1971).
1 child, Jefferson.