Metro, October 24, 2006 “Classic Lady” Ellen Burstyn gives lessons in becoming a legend

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By Amy Benfer

PROFILE. Most celebrity bios are slick, hastily written hack jobs, with salacious content and a generic ghostwriter on hand to smooth out any interesting quirks. “Lessons in Becoming Myself,” written by Academy Award winner and six-time nominee Ellen Burstyn, is the opposite of all of that. “My friend tells me that stories only happen to people who can tell them,” says Burstyn, on her way back from the Rome Film Festival and en route to the East Hampton Film Festival. “I developed my ability to tell stores through acting.”

Burstyn first began writing her book, relying on decades of handwritten journals, in 1980. In 1990, she tried to re-work the same material as a novel. Finally, in 2001, she mentioned the project in a long interview she gave the New York Times, on the occasion of her Oscar nomination for “Requiem for a Dream.” She was contacted by an agent and started working on the book.

Dark beginnings
The tome begins in Detroit, during the Depression, when Burstyn was still Edna Rae Gillooly. Edna Rae was beautiful and popular; she was also beaten by her mother and stepfather. (Her mother later would hide the fact that she had children from her boyfriends, thinking it showed her age.)

Writing the passages on her mother were among the most difficult. “I had to see her in the context of the time and the role of women in that time,” says Burstyn. “In the 45 years between when she had to deal with being a single parent and when I did, there was a huge change in consciousness. In that time, it was shameful.”

‘Searching around’
The book gives a lively account of her days working as a department store model, a waitress and a chorus girl. Throughout, she weaves insight—those would be the “lessons” of the title—that she received through working with Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio (where Burstyn is now co-president) and later through Sufism, which she still practices. Her work as an actress is hardly done—she’ll appear in “Requiem” director Darren Aronofshy’s latest, “The Fountain”—but she says she will continue to write as well. “I’m keeping my antennae open. I’m searching around to see what wants to be examined.”