I asked Ellen Burstyn where a Grammy would go, if she ever won one. She stands up to show me.
“I wonder if I took my iPad off the stand and walked you into my office, where they all are,” she says, immediately reaching for it over a video Zoom. Her assistant, Caitlin, gets the camera turned around, and the Zoom window swings from a living room into a study. Burstyn, 93, narrates as she goes, approaching the wall of statues.
“There’s the Emmy, the Tony, the Golden Lion, the Oscar and the other Emmy,” she tells Variety sweetly. “And then these are all awards, too, from various organizations and people. And then these are my nominations up there,” pointing to dozens of certificates and plaques.
I tell her the good news is that the Grammy is smaller than most of those, so it won’t take up as much room.
“Yeah, it’ll fit,” she says wryly. Then, during the walk back: “That’s the first time I’ve ever shown that to anybody. Nobody asked before.”
That shelf is the reason we’re talking.
Burstyn won her Oscar for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and her Tony for “Same Time, Next Year” in the same year, 1975. Her two Emmys came decades later, for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (2009) and “Political Animals” (2013). This past September she accepted the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival, presented at the screening of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short “Flesh Impact,” in which she plays Marilyn Monroe.
This leaves one letter in the entertainment gold standard.
“Poetry Says It Better: Poems to Help You Wake Up,” published in April by HarperCollins, is Burstyn’s personal collection of the poems that have carried her through nearly nine decades, from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Mary Oliver to Rumi, whose birthplace she once made a pilgrimage to see. She read the audiobook herself — five hours and nine minutes of it — and it earned a Kirkus Star and an Earphones Award. It is now a contender for the Grammy for best audiobook, narration and storytelling recording. If she wins, Burstyn, who turns 94 in December, would complete her EGOT and become the oldest person ever to do it, passing John Gielgud, who was 87. She would be the seventh woman, after Helen Hayes, Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Hudson and Viola Davis.
Burstyn hadn’t been thinking about any of that. But her granddaughter had.
“She said, ‘You know, you’re only one away from an EGOT. You should go for it, Grandma,'” Burstyn recalls. “I don’t know how you ‘go for it.’ But it is thrilling. I understand only six women have ever gotten an EGOT. That’s quite a special event, so I’m all for it.”
We last spoke in 2020 during the pandemic, also over Zoom, when the Netflix drama “Pieces of a Woman” put her in the conversation to become the oldest supporting actress nominee in Oscar history. She told me then that she loved breaking records as she got older. And even though she missed out on a nom, she hasn’t changed her position.
What she wanted to talk today about was the poetry. Asked what she loves about these poems, she didn’t explain, but instead recited William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” — the poem that hit her in high school — while looking directly at the camera, start to finish, from memory.
“I read that, and I was just so reassured somehow that the stuff I was going through in my life at the time wasn’t going to be forever,” Burstyn says. “That went into my heart, and gave me such confidence that my life was going to change. That started my life as a poetry lover.”
Burstyn has never been nervous acting, she says. Her first Broadway audition — in 1957, for a two-act comedy called “Fair Game” — got her the lead. What changed her was realizing that natural ability wasn’t enough, leaving Hollywood for New York and studying with Lee Strasberg. She is now co-president of the Actors Studio, and her advice to young actors is the same thing she learned there: “A creative act comes from the heart.”
When I ask whether she looks at that shelf with pride, her answer is surprising.
“I could have done better. There are things I didn’t do that I should have done, and things that Lee Strasberg encouraged me to do that I wish I had done. So I don’t feel like a success. Yes, I won awards, and yes, I’ve enjoyed my work. I like to work. But I wish I had gone into the great plays of the theater and played those more. I’m disappointed that I didn’t do that.”
Everything happens for a reason, I tell her. And it’s usually our jobs, the cinephiles and admirers of art, to proclaim to the world what her work has meant, and how important it’s been.
As for the new “Exorcist” film — Mike Flanagan’s “The Exorcist: Martyrs,” with Scarlett Johansson — coming next year, more than 53 years after Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil was at the center of that sensation, she expresses dismay. “Isn’t there enough already of the ‘Exorcist’ thing?” she exclaims. “It’s enough already.”
Burstyn has a closing argument for the Recording Academy. “I really enjoy reciting poetry and reading it, and I hope people will read the book,” she says. “But I also hope they will listen to the recording that comes with the book — because I think poetry should be heard.”