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| Birth Name(s) : Ellen Burstyn |
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Full Ellen Burstyn Biography
Burstyn won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1974 for her performance in the movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. She received her first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1971 for the film The Last Picture Show, and was subsequently nominated for Best Actress in 1973 for the horror movie The Exorcist, in 1978 for Same Time, Next Year, in 1980 for Resurrection, and for Requiem for a Dream in 2000.
Burstyn's most recent film appearance was in The Fountain, directed by Darren Aronofsky, with whom she worked in Requiem for a Dream. She also appeared on a 2007 episode of the HBO series Big Love, playing the mother of Polygamist wife Barbara Henrickson.
Burstyn was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Actress in a Miniseries or Special, for the TV movie The People vs. Jean Harris (1981) and again for another TV movie, Pack of Lies (1987).
In 2006, she was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Special for HBO's Mrs Harris as Dr. Tarnower's "Ex-Lover #3." (She had played the title character in The People vs Mrs Jean Harris). She was nominated for a performance that consisted of 14 seconds of screen time, two lines of dialogue and a total of 38 words. This is the shortest nominated performance in the history of the Emmy Awards.
Soon after the nominations were announced, an outcry ensued from the press and the public regarding the worthiness of the nomination. One explanation for the nomination was that people were honoring Burstyn for her nominated but non-winning performance from the first Harris telefilm. A more popular accusation was that the nominating committee was either confused in their recollection, or merely "threw in" her name from sheer recognition, assuming a worthy performance without actually seeing it.
The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences initially insisted that "based on the popular vote, this is a legitimate nomination." Meanwhile, HBO deflected the blame for submitting the nomination to the movie production company. Burstyn's own reaction ranged from initial silence to:“I thought it was fabulous. My next ambition is to get nominated for seven seconds, and ultimately I want to be nominated for a picture in which I don't even appear.”
to this final quote:“This doesn't have anything to do with me. I don't even want to know about this. You people work it out yourself.”
Ultimately, Kelly Macdonald, who starred in The Girl in the Cafe, won the award. (Neither Burstyn nor her costar Cloris Leachman won). In March 2007, the Academy officially announced that eligibility for a Primetime Emmy Award in any long-form supporting-actor category required nominees to appear on-screen in at least 10 percent of the project (9 minutes in a typical 90-minute telefilm).
Many critics still cite this incident to illustrate the lack of integrity in the increasingly expansive process of Emmy nominations, where name and role misrecognition have played an increasingly visible role.
In 1981, Burstyn recorded "The Ballad of the Nazi Soldier's Wife" (Kurt Weill's musical setting of Bertolt Brecht's text "Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?") for Ben Bagley's album Kurt Weill Revisited, Vol. 2. Burstyn served as president of the Actors' Equity Association from 1982 to 1985.
In 1997, Burstyn was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame. In 2000, she was named co-president of The Actor's Studio, alongside Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel.
Burstyn practices Sufism. She is affiliated with the Maezumi Institute (Zen Peacemakers) and says her spiritual journey was inspired by the book The Last Barrier: A Journey Through the World of Sufi Teaching. |
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