Ellen Burstyn marked the Venice premiere of “Place to Be” on Wednesday by reflecting on a six-decade career she once assumed would end by age 40, telling reporters she still finds it astonishing that she’s working steadily at 93. The Oscar winner co-stars in Kornél Mundruczó’s new drama alongside Taika Waititi, one of two projects the actress brought to this year’s festival.
Burstyn told the Venice press corps she began worrying about her career’s longevity while still in her 30s. “I was sure I’d be finished by 40,” she said, describing her continued output as something close to unexplainable good fortune. She credited the shift to decades of activism by women who reshaped how the industry, and audiences, thought about older female performers.
The actress singled out Gloria Steinem, the feminist organizer and Ms. Magazine founder who died earlier this month at 92, as a formative influence on both her career and her politics. Burstyn said Steinem’s magazine shaped her understanding of independence long before she won her Academy Award for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” in 1974, a film she has described as significant precisely because its central character took ownership of her life rather than waiting to be rescued by a man.
Burstyn has spoken at length this week about how dramatically studio sets have changed since she started acting. Decades ago, she has said, women on a production were typically confined to a handful of roles — script supervisor, hairdresser, makeup artist — while nearly every other job on set belonged to men. She now sees women working across every department, a shift she attributes directly to the consciousness-raising sparked by Steinem’s generation of organizers.
The Venice trip has doubled as something of a career retrospective for Burstyn, who is also receiving a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the festival and premiered a short film, “Flesh Impact,” in which she plays a 100-year-old version of Marilyn Monroe. She called the honors this week “slightly overwhelmed,” adding that she has spent recent days questioning what she did to deserve the recognition before crediting her early training for sustaining a career that has outlasted nearly every expectation she set for herself.
“Place to Be” follows an elderly woman and a middle-aged man on a cross-country journey, marking Burstyn’s second collaboration with Mundruczó after “Pieces of a Woman.”
