There are certain ages where society quietly begins adjusting its expectations of you. At 30, people want to know what you’re doing with your life. At 50, they start asking about retirement plans. Somewhere around 70, people become strangely impressed that you’re still doing things you have probably been doing perfectly well for decades. And at 93? Apparently you’re supposed to be sitting somewhere reflecting on everything you’ve already done.
Ellen Burstyn appears to have missed that memo.
The legendary actress arrived at the Venice Film Festival this week not simply to look back on an extraordinary career, but because she’s still adding to it. Burstyn received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on Monday, recognising a career that has included more than 150 screen roles, an Academy Award, two Emmys and a Tony. But here’s the part I find far more interesting. She arrived with new work, at 93.
According to the Associated Press, Burstyn appears in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 17-minute short film Flesh Impact, playing a rather unexpected character: Marilyn Monroe at 100 years old. She also stars alongside Taika Waititi in Kornél Mundruczó’s Place to Be, which is screening out of competition at Venice. Now just think about that for a moment. Most lifetime-achievement awards are understandably about looking backwards. Here are the movies you made. Here are the performances we remember. Here’s a lovely montage covering several decades while everybody applauds and you try not to cry.
Burstyn basically turned up and said, that’s wonderful, but I also have two new projects to show you. And I absolutely love that.
Because Hollywood has always had a rather complicated relationship with ageing, particularly when it comes to women. For decades, actresses watched leading roles become increasingly difficult to find as they got older while their male counterparts continued playing action heroes, romantic leads and occasionally men dating women young enough to be their daughters. We’ve spoken about this before, particularly with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman returning to lead Practical Magic 2 in their 60s.
But Ellen Burstyn takes the conversation somewhere else entirely. She’s 93 years old and still working. And not because somebody has wheeled her out for a nostalgic cameo so audiences can point at the screen and say, “Look who it is.” She’s playing substantial characters and continuing to explore ideas that interest her. Speaking to AP at Venice, Burstyn admitted she never imagined she would still be making movies at 93. To be fair, I don’t think many of us have planned our work calendars that far ahead.
Burstyn’s career stretches back more than six decades. She starred in The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with the latter earning her the Academy Award for Best Actress. She later delivered that devastating performance in Requiem for a Dream, earning another Oscar nomination at an age when Hollywood’s old rulebook would already have considered many actresses past their prime. Yet here we are more than 25 years after Requiem for a Dream, and she’s still going. And perhaps that’s what makes this story considerably more interesting than another celebrity receiving another award.
So who actually decides when we’re too old to do something? Obviously, age changes us. Bodies change. Energy changes. Priorities change. There are jobs that become physically impossible and people who genuinely cannot wait to retire. And good for them. If you’ve spent 40 years attending meetings that should have been emails, you’ve earned the right to disappear into your garden and stop answering anybody. But retirement shouldn’t automatically become a compulsory closing chapter simply because somebody reaches a particular birthday. Some people want to stop. Others apparently want to play a 100-year-old Marilyn Monroe. And Burstyn’s role in Flesh Impact makes the whole thing even more fascinating. Maggie Gyllenhaal created the short around the idea of what Marilyn Monroe might have been like had she lived to 100. Burstyn never met Monroe, but told AP that she felt a connection to her and had previously heard comparisons between them.
There’s something rather beautiful about that casting. Marilyn Monroe died at just 36, meaning the world never got to see what ageing would have looked like for one of Hollywood’s most famous women. She remains permanently frozen in popular culture as young, glamorous and beautiful. Now a 93-year-old actress gets to imagine the years Hollywood and history never gave her. And Place to Be offers something completely different again. Burstyn plays an elderly woman who develops an unlikely friendship with a middle-aged man, played by Waititi, as they travel from Chicago to New York to return a lost racing pigeon. A road movie involving Ellen Burstyn, Taika Waititi and a pigeon. At this point, why wouldn’t you keep working?
But there’s a broader conversation here that goes beyond Hollywood. We have a strange habit of treating life as though everybody should follow roughly the same timetable. Learn. Work. Achieve. Slow down. Retire. Quietly disappear from professional relevance while younger people take over. Except human beings aren’t products. We don’t come with expiry dates printed underneath us. Somebody may produce their greatest work at 25. Somebody else might discover what they’re brilliant at when they’re 60. And somebody like Ellen Burstyn can arrive at one of the world’s biggest film festivals at 93, collect an award celebrating everything she’s already accomplished and still have new work waiting to be seen.
Perhaps that’s the part worth celebrating. Not simply that Ellen Burstyn has worked for more than six decades. Or the Oscar, Tony, Emmys or the Golden Lion. And not even the extraordinary list of performances. It’s the fact that she’s apparently still curious about what comes next. At 93, Ellen Burstyn could quite reasonably spend the rest of her life looking backwards at an extraordinary career. Instead, she’s still asking what the next role is.
And frankly, I hope I’m still that interested in anything at 93.
