Ellen Burstyn: Biography, Actor, The Exorcist

Latest News: Ellen Burstyn Appearing in 'The Exorcist: Believer'

Fifty years after her Academy Award–nominated performance as Chris MacNeil in the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist, 90-year-old Ellen Burstyn is reprising her famous role in the upcoming Universal Pictures and Blumhouse film The Exorcist: Believer. The new movie, set to hit theaters on October 13, will serve as a sequel to the iconic original starring Linda Blair.

Who Is Ellen Burstyn?

Actor Ellen Burstyn has worked in theater, television, and film, racking up six Academy Award nominations among her many credits. She found her breakthrough role in 1971’s The Last Picture Show, before solidifying her career with iconic parts in The Exorcist and Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The latter earned Burstyn an Oscar for Best Actress in 1975. That year, she also won a Tony Award for the play Same Time, Next Year. She served as the first woman president of the Actors’ Equity Association from 1982 through 1985, and she is currently co-president of The Actors Studio with Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Edna Rae Gillooly
BORN: December 7, 1932
BIRTHPLACE: Detroit, Michigan
SPOUSES: William C. Alexander (c. 1950-1955), Paul Roberts (1958-1962), and Neil Burstyn (1964-1972)
CHILD: Jefferson
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Sagittarius

Early Life

Ellen Burstyn was born Edna Rae Gillooly, on December 7, 1932, in Detroit and had a difficult family life in childhood. Her parents, John Austin and Correine Marie Gillooly, divorced when she was very young. Burstyn told Oprah.com she could only recall one meeting with her father while she attended boarding school. Likewise, she has described her relationship with her mother as abusive. “My mother was tough, and she cared for us. I mean, we always, in her words, had a roof over our head and food on the table,” Burstyn said. “But she was controlling and violent. So that sets up a certain pattern of punishment and of feeling you’re not really worthy, that you’re wrong.”

Burstyn had her own personal challenges, too, later revealing she already had an illegal abortion by the time she had turned 18. She left home at that age with only 50 cents in her pocket to find work as a model.

Early Career: Theater, 'The Exorcist,' and Oscar Win

Diane Ladd and Ellen Burstyn perform in a scene in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Burstyn won an Academy Award for her role.

In the late 1950s, she landed her first regular acting gig, as a dancer on television’s The Jackie Gleason Show, billed as Erica Dean. She made her Broadway debut in 1957 in Fair Game, using the stage name Ellen McRae. She would keep that name for the next 10 years while working steadily on television in the daytime drama The Doctors (1964) and the western-themed series The Iron Horse (1966-68), as well as with minor film roles.

After changing her name yet again, this time to Ellen Burstyn, she landed what would become her breakthrough role, that of Lois Farrow in The Last Picture Show (1971), costarring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd. Her performance earned Burstyn her first Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actress. Her second Oscar nod, this time for Best Actress, came two years later for her role in William Friedkin’s famed movie The Exorcist. Burstyn played Chris MacNeil, a middle-aged actor whose daughter (Linda Blair) is possessed by demonic forces.

In 1974, she produced and starred in Martin Scorsese’s emotional drama Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Burstyn pushed to have Scorsese in the director’s chair for the film after she watched his 1973 breakout movie Mean Streets. Her portrayal of a single mother struggling to support herself and her young son notched Burstyn a third Academy Award nomination, and this time she won the Best Actress prize.

More Best Actress Oscar Winners

In addition to her triumphs on screen, Burstyn took home a Tony Award in 1975 for her performance opposite Charles Grodin in Same Time, Next Year. She later reprised her role in the 1978 film version, co-starring Alan Alda, and garnered another Oscar nomination in the lead actress category. Her fourth Best Actress nod came two years later, for Resurrection (1980).

Television Success

A respected member of both the film and theater community, Burstyn served as the first female president of the Actors’ Equity Association from 1982 to 1985. Also in 1982, she and Al Pacino succeeded Lee Strasberg as co-artistic directors of the Actors Studio. Burstyn served in the Actors Studio post for the next six years (Pacino stepped down in 1984).

Throughout the 1980s, she also built up a considerable resume of acclaimed television roles and series, beginning in 1981 with her Emmy-nominated performance in the fact-based miniseries The People vs. Jean Harris. In addition to such dramatic TV movies as Surviving (1985), Into Thin Air (1985), and the Emmy-nominated Pack of Lies (1987), Burstyn tried her hand at comedy with her own series, The Ellen Burstyn Show (1986-87).

Burstyn acted in a steady stream of TV movies in the ’90s with her next series role starting in 2000 on the CBS drama That’s Life. The show followed a 32-year-old bartender, played by Heather Dubrow, who breaks off her engagement and decides to go to college. Burstyn played Dubrow’s onscreen busybody mother for the series’ two seasons.

Guest roles in the late 2000s proved to be more fruitful ground. Burstyn had a recurring guest role on the HBO hit Big Love, which earned her a 2008 Emmy Award nomination. The next year, she won an Emmy for her guest appearance on the crime drama Law & Order: SVU. (She reprised the role in several episodes of Law & Order: Organized Crime as recently as May 2023.)

Ellen Burstyn has won two Emmy Awards, most recently in 2013 for her supporting role on Political Animals.

Burstyn continued to thrive on the small screen in the next decade. She appeared in the 2012 television miniseries Political Animals with Sigourney Weaver and Carla Gugino. She won her second Emmy Award for her work on the miniseries the following year. In 2014, Burstyn had a supporting role in the television movie Flowers in the Attic, based on the novel by V.C. Andrews. Her unsettling turn as a disturbed grandmother netted her another Emmy Award nomination. That same year, Burstyn had a recurring role on Louis C.K.’s sitcom Louie. Her appearance in five episodes of the Netflix political drama House of Cards in 2016 netted Burstyn her eighth and most recent Emmy nomination.

Most recently, Burstyn appeared in a supporting role in Showtime’s The First Lady, a retelling of American history through the eyes of first ladies including Michelle Obama (Viola Davis), Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson). Burstyn played Sara Delano Roosevelt, who was Eleanor’s mother-in-law and mother to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After one season in 2022, the series wasn’t renewed.

'Requiem for a Dream' and More Movies

Burstyn had small performances in a variety of films during the 1990s, including How to Make an American Quilt (1995), starring Winona Ryder, and The Spitfire Grill (1996). In 1998, she was featured as part of the impressive ensemble cast of Playing By Heart, also featuring Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, and Angelina Jolie. Burstyn plays a woman dealing with her grown son’s battle with AIDS in the film. After co-starring in 1999’s little-seen Walking Across Egypt, Burstyn was featured in the crime drama The Yards (2000), starring Mark Wahlberg, James Caan, and Joaquin Phoenix.

Ellen Burstyn earned her sixth Academy Award nomination for Requiem for a Dream (2000).

Shortly after The Yards, she gave a harrowing portrayal of a woman addicted to diet pills in the edgy, disturbing drama Requiem for a Dream (2000), directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly. The performance earned Burstyn a sixth overall Academy Award nomination and her fifth for Best Actress.

Burstyn later told CNN that in order to portray her character’s dramatic weight loss, she wore fat suits of 40 and 20 pounds and eventually lost 10 pounds herself during a two-week break in production. “But I think the hardest part was the emotional demands of the role, because she does go to some horrible depths. And it’s demanding to get there,” she said.

Steady film work continued, though mostly in movies that didn’t gain much traction. One exception was her starring role in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002) alongside Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Maggie Smith, and James Garner. She also had roles in Interstellar (2014) and The Age of Adaline (2015).

In 2020, Burstyn played Vanessa Kirby’s onscreen mother in the Netflix drama Pieces of a Woman. The film was generally praised, with Kirby receiving her own Academy Award nomination.

'The Exorcist: Believer'

Burstyn turned 90 in 2022 and has yet to see her career slow. In October 2023, she will reprise her role as Chris MacNeil from The Exorcist in a direct sequel subtitled Believer. Burstyn had repeatedly declined offers to reappear in the franchise throughout her career but changed her mind when Universal and the production companies honored her request to fund a scholarship program at Pace University, where she teaches an Actors Studio program.

Burstyn has served as a co-president of The Actors Studio, a theater workshop allowing actors to perfect their craft in privacy, since 1995. She currently leads the organization alongside Alec Baldwin and Al Pacino and previously served as the artistic director for its New York studio location.

Husbands and Son

Jefferson and Ellen Burstyn attend the 7th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Burstyn has been married and divorced three times and has one son.

Her first husband was poet William C. Alexander. Their marriage lasted about five years through the mid-1950s.

She met her second husband on her first Broadway show, Fair Game, in 1957. Paul Roberts was the play’s director, and they began a relationship. After discovering she was infertile, Burstyn and Roberts adopted a son, Jefferson, in 1961 shortly before their divorce. She has said Jefferson is named after former President Thomas Jefferson. Burstyn told The Los Angeles Times in 1975 that her relationship with onscreen son Tommy in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was inspired by conversations with then 13-year-old Jefferson.

Burstyn’s third husband, Neil Burstyn, was a promising actor and writer but suffered from schizophrenia and showed violent tendencies. They married in 1964 and had separated before their 1972 divorce. In an interview with Oprah.com, she described how Neil stalked her when they were separated. She also says he raped her inside her home while they were still married, but police didn’t intervene. “[They] said no crime had been committed. He had a perfect right to do that because we were still married,” Ellen explained.

Neil eventually died by suicide in 1978, and Ellen experienced feelings of guilt. “It was because so many things coincided—he went crazy right as I started to get work, and he was an actor who didn’t get work,” she said. “It seemed like somehow my success had caused his insanity.” Ellen also wrote about their tumultuous relationship in her 2007 memoir Lessons in Becoming Myself.

Net Worth

Ellen Burstyn’s net worth is approximately $20 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

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