Oscar-winning actress Ellen Burstyn exorcises her demons in an inspiring new autobiography. Ellen Burstyn isn’t trying to make an entrance, but she can’t help it. She is an elegant, cool vision, her off-white outfit flowing, as she sweeps into a Manhattan sound studio on a boiling late-summer morning. The 73-year-old Academy Award-winning actress has traveled from her upstate New York home to record the audio version of her new book, Lessons in Becoming Myself (Riverhead).

The book is a harrowing and ultimately inspiring memoir that tracks her journey from childhood abuse to the pinnacle of Hollywood movies in the golden, licentious ‘70s, through three chaotic marriages and on to spiritual transformation and emotional rebirth in later life. Burstyn serves up this tale with the same unwavering honesty that has distinguished her acting career of nearly 50 years.

Still it took her 26 years to get it all down on paper. “I started writing it in 1980,” Burstyn says. “Started, stopped, started, and stopped. Wrote it in the third person as a novel, played around with it all that time.” As a lifelong diary keeper, she had volumes of notes and observations from which to draw, but she was shy about going public with the painful stuff. “I wanted to take out all the parts that I was ashamed about”, she says. “Finally I said, “Wait a minute—these are your lessons. Are you ashamed that you didn’t know from the beginning what you learned later?””

But while life’s lessons may have come hard for Burstyn, acting always seemed easy. Audiences know her best as Chris MacNeil, the mother of a demon-possessed daughter in The Exorcist, a film that continues to chill audiences more than 30 years after Linda Blair’s head stopped spinning. It earned Burstyn one of her five Oscar nominations as Best Actress; she also got a shot at the gold statuette for her roles in Requiem for a Dream (2000), Resurrection (1980), Same Time Next Year (1978), and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), for which she won the Academy Award.

As she grew older and challenging parts dwindled, Burstyn took on leadership roles in the film industry, and in maturity has attained emeritus stature. She was the first woman ever to be elected president of Actors Equity, and also served as artistic director of the Actors Studio, where she had trained in The Method technique with Lee Strasberg, the man she credits with encouraging her to always seek truth in work and in life.

She continues to work at her craft, adding heft this year in two films in supporting roles: as a powerful pagan priestess in Neil LaBute’s remake of the horror movie The Wicker Man, and as Hugh Jackman’s friend and mentor in Darren Aronofsky’s scif-fi epic The Fountain. It was Aronofsky who gave Burstyn her last substantial role, as the widowed mother Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream. As Goldfarb, pathetically gobbling diet pills so she could fit into a red dress from her youth, she created an excruciating portrait of self-degradation.

Sadly, Burstyn’s childhood supplied plenty of dramatic material for her art, as well as the motivation to seek refuge and recognition in adopting alternate identities. Edna Rae Gillooly was born in Detroit into a home wracked by physical and psychological violence. Her father didn’t stick around long; and although her mother took her to ballet class and passed on her fine features and dewy skin to her only daughter, she would also take as her third husband a man who treated Edna and her brother Jack with contempt. As a sexually precocious teenager, Edna endured beatings by her stepfather, and on her 18^th birthday, she fled. After landing in New York City as a model and aspiring actress with 45 cents and The Best-Loved Plays of William Shakespeare in her bag, she found work on The Jackie Gleason Show. in 1957 Burstyn won the lead role in a Broadway play, Fair Game. As she recounts in Lessons, she called her mother to announce the good news; her mother’s reaction summed up their relationship.

 “Mom, looks like I can’t visit you this summer. I just got the lead in a Broadway play.”

“Oh, it’s always something,” she said in a disgusted voice.

That something, it turned out, was an unstoppable gift. Her movie career caught fire when she played Cybil Shepherd’s jaded, soused mother in Peter Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show (1971). “Ellen came in to read looking slovenly, wearing a wrap-around dress with a big slit,” recalls the film’s production design, Polly Pratt. “I remember thinking, 'This girl couldn’t have any talent; she’s so lackadaisical.’ She read the part of both the mother and the football coach’s wife [later played by Cloris Leachman], and she was brilliant at both of them. I could not believe it—she spilled her brilliance all around us life a box of jewels.”

As her career roared along, Burstyn’s personal life played out as a long-running disaster. In Lessons she draws a clear line from the turmoil of her early life to a pattern of disastrous romantic choices in adulthood; she was inexorably drawn to sadistic men, fought back at times with equal cruelty, and succumbed to depression and alcohol abuse. One husband though he was Jesus and stalked her during the making of The Exorcist. When she attempted reconciliation with her natural father, he tried to molest her.

The arc of Burstyn’s memoir, and indeed her life, takes a satisfying turn toward emotional resolution after the suicide of her third husband in 1978. She swears off romantic relationships for the next 25 years, embarking on a long process of healing through Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, and hardheaded self-analysis. Today she betrays no hint of bitterness or sense of victimhood. “I choose to be happy and enjoy life and be grateful. I’ve found that gratitude is the most healthy and pleasant experience,” she says.

“No matter what character she’s playing, she has a connectedness to human frailty, and to large issues of right and wrong,” says Marcia Gay Harden, who costarred with Burstyn in The Spitfire Grill and considers her a mentor. “She just elevates everything she does to a level that you’ve always wanted but never quite managed to do in your own life,” says Harden.

“It’s like playing tennis with somebody who’s better than you,” says Neil LaBute of directing Burstyn in The Wicker Man. “She’s the kind of person who simultaneously makes it look easy, and yet you’re very sure that ‘I can’t do that’.”

Burstyn is no longer alone: she reveals in the epilogue to Lessons that a man from her days at the Actors Studio confessed, shortly after she completed the memoir, that he’d been in love with her for 24 years. They’re together, and she prefers not to say more than that, “because it’s new, and tender. It’s not yet two years old. When my husbands were alive, I never talked about my marriages in print, and I can only talk about them now because they’re dead. But I still feel the same way about my active relationship.” The one constant man in her life, she says, has been her beloved adopted son, 45-year-old Jefferson, who encourages her pursuits with a “You go, Mommy Swami.”

Burstyn expresses few regrets or complaints in Lessons, nor does she hold grudges or dish gossip. But she does lend her voice to the chorus of complaints, by now almost deafening, from over-40 actresses about the dearth of meaty film roles. “When I work now, I play old,” she says. “I’m doing a picture called The Stone Angel next month, and I’m going to play 85. Women can get to be to 50 in the movies, and after that they’re just old ladies. There’s nobody in film who looks like me at 73—instead we’re washed-up, white-haired, doddering old ladies. I would love somebody to write about a woman in her 60s, or even 70s, who is, um…”

Sexy?

“Yeah.”

Author and critic John Anderson has written extensively about movies. He is the former chief film critic for Newsday.