Ellen Burstyn is "busier" than ever at the age of 90.
Ellen Burstyn is busier than ever at the age of 90
The award-winning actress - who stars on 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit' - believes she's actually busier than she's ever been in her career.
Ellen told Interview magazine: "I turn 91 in December and I’m busier than I can ever remember being at any point in my career. And I don’t understand it at all. I mean, what’s all this stuff about ageism in Hollywood? How did I get left out of it?"
Ellen suggested that she's the "only actress still standing who can play the great-grandmother".
Asked about her enduring popularity, Ellen replied: "I don’t know, except possibly that everybody else who could play those parts has already died, so I’m the only actress still standing who can play the great-grandmother or something."
Despite this, Ellen revealed that she preferred working in the 70s.
She explained: "That was when the studios were still run by filmmakers, not by corporations. And the scripts were submitted because somebody was interested in that story and wrote it, and a producer liked it and thought it would make a good movie. Not because it had been fed into a computer and said, 'Well, the first version made X number of millions, so the second one will make X number of millions and it has to have a big name.'"
Ellen cited the 1971 drama 'The Last Picture Show' and 'The Exorcist', the legendary horror movie, as two of her favourite projects.
She shared: "In the ’70s, I made pictures like 'The Last Picture Show' where we went to a small town in Texas and met the locals and all lived together in the same hotel, isolated from everything else.
"We spent all our time together and rehearsed the scenes. It was done like a play. And the same with 'The Exorcist'. We rehearsed for a couple of weeks on set before we started shooting."
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