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Ellen Burstyn became world-famous in the 1970s through her performances in such films as The Exorcist, The Last Picture Show, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress. She continues to pursue a distinguished career in film, television, and theater, which has earned her six Academy Award nominations, seven Golden Globe nominations, a Tony Award for the Broadway play Same Time, Next Year, a British Academy Award, two Emmy nominations, and many other honors. Yet for most of her adult life, she has also traveled a demanding path of personal growth and spiritual insight that has deepened her understanding of herself and led her ever closer to the universal truths at the heart of the world's great religions. Considered by many to be one of our greatest living actors, Burstyn now chronicles her extraordinary journey in both acting and life in her captivating memoir, Lessons in Becoming Myself.
Little in Burstyn's early life suggested that she would become a celebrated star of screen and stage, the first female president of Actors Equity, co-president of the prestigious Actors Studio, or a minister in the mystical religious tradition called Sufism. Born Edna Rae Gillooly in Detroit in the middle of the Depression, she was raised Catholic by a dominating mother. She left home at eighteen and took modeling jobs in Detroit and Dallas. Determined and driven, Burstyn recognized that this was only the beginning of her journey to fulfillment and self-knowledge.
Writing entirely in her own words with disarming candor, Burstyn tells how she moved to New York and became a "Glea Girl" on "The Jackie Gleason Show." In her first theatrical audition, she won a lead in a Broadway play. She went on to land a role on the soap opera "The Doctors" and work in B movies, which eventually led to her breakthrough role as Lois Farrow in The Last Picture Show and her rise to international stardom as Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist. She soon became one of the few actresses in Hollywood who was initiating and effectively producing her own projects—although she never took full credit for them—starting with the groundbreaking Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. From the mid-1960s on, Burstyn was also steadily developing her craft and her remarkable ability to bring emotional truth to her roles through her studies with the legendary Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.
In the early 1970s, Burstyn began the Sufi spiritual practice that led her into the most fulfilling period of her life. Sufism, a mystical tradition with origins in Islam, embraces the fundamental truths of all religions. With keen insight and passages of lyric beauty, Burstyn describes how she traveled the world in search of enlightenment, from the San Fernando Valley to the French Alps, England to Cambodia, Ireland to the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan.
When she began to write her memoir in 2001, Burstyn drew on diaries and journals she has been keeping since childhood. Among the topics she covers are: the great joy she took in raising her son, Jeff, mostly on her own; her groundbreaking portrayal of a single mother seeking both romance and self-respect in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore; and new aspects of the story behind the filming of The Exorcist. She describes the pleasures and challenges of working with such legendary film and stage artists as William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson, Cloris Leachman, Donald Sutherland, Charles Grodin, Jodie Foster, Kris Kristofferson, Alan Alda and many others.
She evokes the complicated emotions she felt at receiving her first major award (for The Last Picture Show) and at winning an Oscar (for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore) and a Tony (for Same Time, Next Year) in the same year. She writes of the spiritual understanding she brought to her performance as faith healer Edna McCauley in Resurrection; her intensely rewarding work in such classic plays as Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night; and the creativity and energy she felt in working with young filmmakers in such acclaimed independent movies as The Spitfire Grill, The Yards, and Requiem for a Dream. Today, she is busy with a full slate of forthcoming projects, including two new films, Wicker Man and The Fountain.
Above all, however, Burstyn's story is a quest for greater self-knowledge and deeper spiritual perception. "If you want to know who you truly are," she writes, "the answer won't be found in the outer world; you must go inside and see where your instincts lead you." With sensitivity and insight, she tells how she turned even personal pain and tragedy – including personal missteps, toxic relationships, and private demons she battled – into opportunities for personal transformation.
Burstyn writes: "Kierkegaard said that we understand our lives backward, but must live them forward. Writing this book has been the most extraordinary vehicle for understanding my life. I have marveled at the intricacy of the pattern that has emerged from reading over my diaries, notebooks and interviews."
In her revealing, eloquent, and inspirational memoir, one of our most gifted and admired actresses passes on the fruitful lessons she has learned from a lifetime of rich experience in her personal life, her career, and her spiritual quest.
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