{"id":617289,"date":"2026-09-07T14:58:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T14:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/617289\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T14:58:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T14:58:11","slug":"ellen-burstyn-on-being-recognized-by-marilyn-monroe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/617289\/","title":{"rendered":"Ellen Burstyn on Being “Recognized” By Marilyn Monroe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEllen Burstyn<\/a> never met Marilyn Monroe. Not properly, anyway. By the time she walked through the doors of the Actors Studio in New York, Monroe was already dead. But the two women did see each other once, across a nightclub table, and Burstyn has been carrying the moment around for the better part of six decades.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was enchanted just looking at her. She was such a magical creature,\u201d Burstyn recalled, speaking to reporters at the Venice Film Festival, where she is presenting two films this year and will receive an honorary Golden Lion for lifetime achievement<\/a> at a ceremony this evening. \u201cAnd then she looked at me and nodded at me. I was very early in my career, and I thought: I\u2019ve just been recognized by Marilyn Monroe. I carried that in my heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBurstyn plays a version of Monroe, an imagined projection as if the legendary actress had lived into her 90s, in Flesh Impact, a new short film from director\u00a0Maggie Gyllenhaal<\/a>\u00a0(The Bride!). Dakota Johnson plays the younger Monroe in flashbacks. She also appears in Korn\u00e9l Mundrucz\u00f3\u2019s drama\u00a0Place to Be, which screens out of competition in Venice, as an elderly woman who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a middle-aged divorced man (played by Taika Waititi). <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe\u2019s the most talented, funny, nice, charming, adorable human being I\u2019ve ever worked with,\u201d said Burstyn. \u201cThe movie is about our relationship, and of course he\u2019s a young man compared to me, and I\u2019m much older, so it\u2019s not a sexual relationship, but it is a love relationship [and] that\u2019s what I think people are going to respond to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAsked how the role of women in Hollywood has changed since she started out, the actress didn\u2019t hesitate: \u201cOh my goodness. Enormously.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen I first started working, which was 150 years ago,\u201d the 93-year-old added, drawing a laugh, \u201cthere were no women on the set. There were no women in the crew. Nobody. It was all men. If a woman was on the set, then she was an actress.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe change, she said, came slowly and incrementally, one job at a time: first a script supervisor, then a camera assistant, then more. \u201cSlowly that changed, until finally it\u2019s gotten to the point where women are handling heavy equipment without even thinking about it, and they\u2019re integrated into the crew.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThe roles themselves took longer, and Burstyn had a hand in forcing that particular door open. The origin story of Alice Doesn\u2019t Live Here Anymore, the 1974 road movie that won her the Academy Award for best actress, begins on the set of The Exorcist<\/a>. John Calley, then running Warner Bros., called her agent and said the studio wanted to make another film with her. The scripts started arriving.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEvery one of them was this old-fashioned idea of what women represent,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t recognize any of the characters as anything like the women I knew, or myself. Their husbands would go out and save the world, and when they came home, the women would hand them a cup of tea. It was that kind of supportive role.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSo she made a counteroffer. \u201cI said, \u2018Well, I\u2019d like to make a film about women as I know women to be.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a director, she picked \u201can unknown director\u201d with a single feature to his name: Martin Scorsese<\/a>. His working method, she said, shaped the film as much as the screenplay did. At the end of each shooting day, the company would rehearse the following day\u2019s scene \u2014 and improvise through it. \u201cThat script grew into a film that I think is credited with helping to change the consciousness of women worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Exorcist, by contrast, she described as both transformative and brutal. William Friedkin was \u201can extremely talented director,\u201d she said, \u201cbut he was also one of those directors who would do anything to get a shot\u201d \u2014 including, in her case, a back injury she says she should never have sustained. \u201cIt was a life-changing experience, but it was painful physically.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAsked about the through-line in her memoir \u2014 the way her discovery of herself as an actress ran parallel to her discovery of herself as a woman \u2014 Burstyn credited her decades studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors\u2019 Studio. \u201cWhen you study with a master, it changes your life,\u201d she said. \u201cIt changes who you are to yourself, because it brings you into areas not only of your art but of your own being and your own understanding. And it changes what you do forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe work never stopped, either. Even after winning the Oscar [for Alice Doesn\u2019t Live Here Anymore], and after Strasberg had put her in front of a classroom to teach, she was still turning up as a student. \u201cI was still working for him,\u201d she said, \u201cbringing in scenes, bringing in difficult things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe octogenarian mainly avoided politics during the talk, with only a side mention that \u201cmy country right now is providing a lot of material to be explored artistically and politically.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tAsked if she had any advice for younger actresses coming up, Burstyn recounted her own encounter, early in her career, with a screen legend of her youth. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI met Bette Davis. She said, \u2018the only thing that\u2019s important is your work. Anybody tries to get in the way of you and your work. They\u2019re your enemy\u2019,\u201d Burstyn recalled. \u201cSo that was my advice from the older generation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ellen Burstyn never met Marilyn Monroe. Not properly, anyway. By the time she walked through the doors of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":617290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,125478,93,61,1042,60,237624],"class_list":["post-617289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-ellen-burstyn","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-international","tag-ireland","tag-venice-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}