Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Philippa Hawker, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
Ellen Burstyn took a while to become who she was, she says, for all kinds of reasons. She has had a long, rich and varied career as an actor on stage, screen and TV and has taught acting for many years. On the phone from New York, she's a mixture of energy, reflection and good humour.
She comes to Melbourne next week to give acting masterclasses at the 16th Street Actors Studio and for An Evening with Ellen Burstyn, a Q&A moderated by Noni Hazlehurst. At 79, Burstyn is still working; she has never rested on her laurels. She has won an Oscar (she's been nominated six times), a Tony and an Emmy: her most recent Academy Award nomination came in 2001, with a striking performance in Requiem for a Dream; her last Emmy nomination was in 2009. She made her Broadway debut more than half a century ago but it was only last year that she appeared on the West End for the first time, in Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, alongside Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men).
There was nothing charmed about her early years. She was a performer from a young age but that's markedly different from being an actor, she says. In her autobiography, published in 2007, she is frank and unflinching about the tumult of her early years and her difficult family life. She was born Edna Rae Gillooly - not the best of names for an aspiring actress, she notes matter-of-factly. She had several names in the early stages of her career, when she worked as a model, dancer and actress.
''It was probably symptomatic of the state I was in,'' she says. ''I was ad libbing my way through life, I dropped high school, didn't go to college or acting school, I just hit the road and left Detroit and set out to see the world … I just kind of threw myself at it.''
When she decided to try out for a Broadway play, she had no idea how to go about it. She didn't have an agent, or even know how to get an audition. But at her first try, she landed the lead in a comedy about the fashion business, called Fair Game; at that point, her stage name was Ellen McRae.
''I had a career for maybe seven or eight years, doing whatever I could get,'' she says. ''It was working well enough, I was getting by. But I was looking at other actors whom I felt knew something I didn't know. When I saw Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page and Brando, I could see there was a secret somewhere that I wanted to learn.''
What they had in common was they were part of the Actors Studio. Since 1951, the studio had been under the direction of legendary actor, director and teacher Lee Strasberg, focusing on the techniques of method acting. In 1964, Burstyn started private classes with Strasberg, not confident enough to audition to be a member. She studied with him for several years but failed her preliminary audition. Strasberg wasn't there, she says, and she heard afterwards that he wasn't happy that she had not been accepted. Next year, she was in. She had no thought of becoming a teacher but Strasberg ''asked me to start moderating sessions at the Actors Studio. I didn't feel prepared to do it but I did it because he asked me and as time went on, I … found that I liked it and it came to me quite easily.''
Strasberg and the studio, she says, gave her an enormous amount. ''For the kind of roles I wanted, the kind of acting I hoped to do, I didn't really have any idea of how to get down into the depths of a human being and that's what I learnt from studying with Lee.''
In 1970, she started calling herself Ellen Burstyn, taking the name of her then-husband. She became part of the wave of new American cinema that flourished in the '70s, with memorable performances in The Last Picture Show, The King of Marvin Gardens and The Exorcist. Looking for a strong female lead role, she found the script for Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More, the story of a widowed young mother with dreams of a new life as a singer. Burstyn was asked if she wanted to direct it. But she lacked the confidence and decided she wanted someone ''new and exciting'' to direct it and Martin Scorsese was recommended to her. It won her an Oscar for best actress.
She has continued to work, teach, write and explore. She is currently co-president of the Actors Studio and in 1982 became the first female president of Actors' Equity.
She has just finished an off-Broadway play called The Atmosphere of Memory (''It was quite bawdy and offended some people but it was beautifully written and I loved doing it''). She has been filming a new TV series, Coma, and has a new book project, focusing on her favourite poems.
She likes to work with young filmmakers, such as James Gray, with whom she made The Yards, and Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan), who directed her in The Fountain and Requiem for a Dream. In the intense, hallucinatory Requiem, she plays a woman who becomes disastrously addicted to diet pills at the same time that her son battles a heroin habit.
''At first I didn't want to do it,'' she says. ''I thought, 'This is the most depressing script I have ever read in my life. Who wants to go to see these people on the screen?' I told my agent I didn't want to do it. And she said, 'Before you do it, have a look at Aronofsky's first film, Pi.' I put on Pi … and I said, 'OK, I get it, he's an artist.'''
She talks vividly about the nature of acting, of the demands and pleasures of work and preparation and the exhilaration of discovery. ''The more you do it, the more sure-footed you become. You learn to embrace those moments of trepidation, of fear and trembling, and allow them to be. To be part of the performance. Then when you learn that you survive that, and it's not only OK but satisfying, then you look forward to that very difficulty.''
She lives intensely with the work and the character while she is involved in it but ''once it is over and I walk away, it all sort of goes to sleep, wherever it blows up from, it goes back down underground''.
Roles she has played, years apart, can have things in common, she says, but ''it's more that some aspect of myself that I used for a character a long time ago might be awakened by a new character'' - although, she adds, ''it has changed in the meantime''. And change, it's clear, is something Burstyn is always ready to embrace.
Ellen Burstyn's masterclass can be observed by the public. An Evening with Ellen Burstyn is at Cinema Como on Wednesday. 16thstreet.com.au
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