Newsday, November 20, 2006 "To her, art is truth and consequences"

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By Gene Seymour

1970s American films as "The Exorcist," "The Last Picture Show" and "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" still prefers to stroll along the cutting edge of art.

"Exciting, but not pretty"

Burstyn was a featured guest at last month's Hamptons International Film Festival, appearing at the festival's screenings of "The Fountain," fielding audience questions at a Guild Hall tribute to her career and signing copies of her recently published autobiography, "Lessons in Becoming Myself" (Riverhead). Burstyn's compulsively readable and unflinchingly honest book offers further proof - if any were needed - of her commitment to truth-telling.

"I figured what if I took my life like a hand grenade and just threw it out and let anybody do with it what they want," Burstyn said, explaining her decision to become an author. "You know, 'Here I am! Here it is! Will this do you any good? Take it!'"

The life Burstyn shares with readers is, as she aptly puts it, "exciting, but not pretty." Born Edna Rae Gilhooley in Detroit, she faced perpetual disapproval from her divorced mother, who persisted in tweaking her daughter's hard-won self-esteem even after Burstyn won an Oscar and a Tony in the mid-1970s, respectively for "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" and "Same Time Next Year."

Burstyn's tumultuous childhood came to a traumatic end with an illegal abortion at age 18. She began working as a model and an actress, soon afterward appearing on such TV shows as "The Jackie Gleason Show" and "The Doctors," and honing her craft with Lee Strasberg at New York's Actors Studio (she is now co-president).

Recovering memories

Burstyn recalls these and other periods of her life with a surfeit of emotional and physical detail. "I'd been keeping notebooks and journals since the '50s," she says. "And I'd been doing so without any real thought that I would ever write a book like this. It was this unconscious process of writing everything down and saving everything."

But what about the things she hadn't written down, including the vivid memories of her early childhood? How could she know not only what she saw and did back then, but how she felt? Recovering such memories, she says, isn't much different than building a character for the stage or screen.

"If I want to evoke a certain emotional state," she says, "I start by grabbing at the sensory elements around it; what you were aware of on the periphery of the experience, the smells, the sounds you were accustomed to hearing. And when all those senses come alive, the emotional memory comes all by itself. It's an exercise we use in acting called 'effective memory,' and it can work in writing as well as it does in acting."

Her steady rise to the fame in that arena in the early 1970s is juxtaposed with her account of her stormy third marriage, to actor Neil Burstyn, which ended in divorce in 1971. He would commit suicide seven years later. Burstyn found solace in the Sufi religion, her search for inner peace taking her to such places as the Swiss Alps and India's Ganges River.

Enormous liberation

And she has continued to teach and work, testing herself in adventurous movies. Whether writing or acting, it must be a strain on even the most resilient psyche to plunge into such demanding roles as the one in "Requiem for a Dream."

"That may be," she says. "But there's also enormous liberation. I remember at the end of every day I worked on 'Requiem' feeling this enormous sense of - liberation, really, even though the work of that day made you descend into the deepest, darkest level of the human mind, including your own."

She could be talking about acting and writing as she adds, "When you take the most difficult material of your own life and use it, you transform it into art."