At this year’s Venice Film Festival, Ellen Burstyn is set to receive the kind of recognition one waits their whole life to experience. The 93-year-old actress, producer and author will be honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. She also has two films being shown.
“It’s very special to have your whole career honored,” Burstyn said in an email. “And when it’s called the Lifetime Achievement Award, it says that your time on planet Earth didn’t go to waste.”
Burstyn, a longtime New Yorker who lives on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, is no stranger to awards. She is one of the few performers to achieve what the industry calls the Triple Crown of Acting: winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” in 1975, followed by a Tony for Best Actress for “Same Time, Next Year” and two Emmys for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Political Animals.” Over the past seven decades, she has received more than 20 major nominations across film, television and theater.
Burstyn’s two films at this year’s festival are Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “Flesh Impact,” a 17-minute short, and the director Kornél Mundruczó’s feature film, “Place to Be.”
This marks Burstyn’s second collaboration with Mundruczó and his frequent writing partner, Kata Wéber. The trio previously worked together on “Pieces of a Woman,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2020.
The “Place to Be” follows an unlikely friendship between a no-nonsense woman, played by Burstyn, and a middle-aged divorced man, played by Taika Waititi, as they trek from Chicago to New York to return a lost racing pigeon to its owner.
“Cinema has always been strangely afraid of the passage of time. We tolerate old men, but when a woman grows older, we often expect her to become invisible,” Mundruczó said over email. “Ellen has the rare ability to bring her entire raw existence onto the screen. She enters the moment as if she has never been there before, and yet there is an extraordinary precision in what she does,” he added.
Gyllenhaal’s “Flesh Impact,” which she wrote and directed, explores what could have happened if Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962 at 36, had lived to her 100th birthday. Dakota Johnson plays a young Monroe, while Burstyn portrays her at 100.
“I knew people that were close to Marilyn. And I knew her persona that she adopted for film isn’t who she was,” Burstyn said. “That she was a deep thinker, wide reader, and someone who created the Marilyn Monroe image without necessarily being that image she created,” she added.
To prepare, Burstyn watched many of Monroe’s films, “and I felt her as I watched them,” she explained. “I wanted to be as much of the Marilyn Monroe as I heard existed underneath the image.”
“Ellen has a depth, strength and the ability to be really vulnerable,” Gyllenhaal said in a phone call. “She utterly, totally, inhabited this character and included such a wide range of expressions that are totally specific to her.”
It’s not surprising Burstyn was cast to play a complicated, resilient character. She has repeatedly portrayed multidimensional women with emotional contradictions. She played a mother fighting to save her demonically possessed daughter in “The Exorcist,” a single mother pursuing her dream of becoming a singer while rebuilding her life in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” an emotionally neglected Texas housewife who has an affair with a younger man in “The Last Picture Show” and a diet-pill-addicted widow desperate to lose weight so she can appear on television in “Requiem for a Dream.”
Of all her roles, Burstyn said the one that resonated the most with audiences, and herself, was “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”
“I wanted to bring to the screen a character that embodied the changes that I felt women were going through at the time, where they were living their own life, or as Alice says in the film, ‘It’s my life, not some man’s life I’m helping him out with,’” she said. “And that was revolutionary when we portrayed that. I think it helped affect the consciousness that was changing for women at the time.”
The Venice Film Festival is not only recognizing a beloved actor and honoring her contributions, it’s also breaking what Mundruczó described as a taboo.
“To have her receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award while two films in which she appears are being presented at the same festival is a remarkable constellation,” Mundruczó said. “I hope we do not look at it only as a celebration of an extraordinary actress. I see it also as a small rebellion against the idea that cinema belongs only to the young.”
For Burstyn, too, this is a far cry from where she envisioned herself being.
“When I was younger, I didn’t picture myself still working at this age,” she said. “I thought I’d be an old lady knitting booties.”
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