Ellen Burstyn - biography

“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!”

“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!’”

“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.”

“Well my taste wasn’t very good when I first started out.  But later, when I began to appreciate the art of acting, I would say the actress I most admire is Vanessa Redgrave.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It’s a sin to have your films not to make money.”

“Nobody would want to leave that film to go get high.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To me, it’s a very moral film.  If my son were a teenager now, I would drag him to see it.”

“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.”

“Marlon is not here tonight, because - he’s Marlon [at a tribute to Elia Kazan].”

“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.”

“I did my famous cabbage soup diet, so I was able to do it.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that’s it.”

“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?’”

“What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.”

Ellen Burstyn has appeared in the following films:
Goodbye Charlie (1964)
For Those Who Think Young (1964)
Pit Stop (1969)
Alex in Wonderland (1970)
Tropic of Cancer (1970)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)
The Exorcist (1973)
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
Providence (1977)
Kravgi gynaikon (1978)
Same Time, Next Year (1978)
Resurrection (1980)
Silence of the North (1981)
The Ambassador (1984)
Twice in a Lifetime (1985)
Hanna’s War (1988)
Dying Young (1991)
Grand Isle (1991)
The Color of Evening (1994)
When a Man Loves a Woman (1994)
How to Make an American Quilt (1995)
Roommates (1995)
The Baby-Sitters Club (1995)
The Spitfire Grill (1996)
Liar (1997)
Playing by Heart (1998)
The Hurricane (1999)
Walking Across Egypt (1999)
You Can Thank Me Later (1999)
The Yards (2000)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)
Red Dragon (2002)
The Wicker Man (2006)
The Fountain (2006)
30 Days (2006)
The Elephant King (2006)
The Stone Angel (2007)
Lovely, Still (2008)
The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (2008)
Greta (2009)
The Mighty Macs (2009)
The Velveteen Rabbit (2009)
Main Street (2010)
Another Happy Day (2011)
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (2011)