The smart money is said to be on Julia Roberts to take the best actress Oscar in March for her gritty and charismatic portrayal of the factually based eponymous character in Erin Brockovich. However, if there's any justice in Hollywood - and it's a quality often in particularly short supply come Oscars time - the award will go to Ellen Burstyn, who won her first Academy Award in 1974 for Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, when Julia Roberts was seven years old.
Whatever the outcome on awards night, Burstyn is certain to be nominated next month for her astonishing comeback performance in Darren Aronofsky's riveting and deeply unsettling drama of selfdelusion and addiction, Requiem For a Dream. She plays Sara Goldfarb, a lonely Coney Island widow who spends most of her days glued to TV game shows and blithely unaware that her aimless son, Harry (Jared Leto), and his best friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), are engaged in drug-dealing.
The utopian dreams Harry shares with his new girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), and with Tyrone, begin to unravel horrifically as they become hooked on the drugs they are peddling. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Sara, told she has won a spot on her favourite game show, embarks on a severe amphetamine-based crash diet which leads to her becoming dangerously addicted to pills and losing her last grasp on reality.
"I think the whole film is amazing," Burstyn commented, when we met in London recently. The role challenged her emotionally and technically more than anything she has done in decades as an actress. "It was quite something," she says. "I had to undergo a whole physical change to maintain the way she spoke and the way she looked, and then I had to be true to this false persona for myself."
In the weeks before making the film, she had played the tragic drug-addicted Mary Tyrone in a stage production of Eugene O'Neill's searing epic family drama, Long Day's Journey Into Night, which helped her to prepare intellectually for the role of Sara Goldfarb. "I was working with addictions all year, and one of the things that became clear to me is that the function of addiction is to keep one from feeling one's feelings," she says. As we discuss this, she rejects my view that the film portrays television as a monster preying on the dreams and hopes of gullible people. "I don't look at it that way," she says. "I think Sara used television as an addiction. I had a very clear insight when I was making the film that if Sara had been able to face her pain, and the fact that her life had no meaning, she could have had an opportunity of really changing her life instead of escaping into television and food and chocolate. It leads to her addiction and propels her into hell.
"It's the same with the fantasies she has about her son getting a job, a wife and family, which are so far removed from the realities of his life, which she doesn't want to face. And then there is her fantasy of being on television and getting to wear her red dress again, and all these things keep her away from the reality of her life."
Sara's physical transformation involved Burstyn wearing four different prosthetic necks (both fat and emaciated), two different fat suits (one weighing 20 pounds, the other 40), and nine different wigs. And for some scenes, the camera was attached to her body.
"Yes, we each had the pleasure of being the camera mount during the production," she says. "By the time it became my turn, I was quite mad as a character, anyway. It was the scene where I'm alone in the apartment and going around feeling really spooked and paranoid, looking out the window and being afraid of the refrigerator. So the camera was over my shoulders as I walked around and then again behind me. It became quite incorporated into what I was doing, to my surprise."
For such an intense young director, Darren Aronofsky is "surprisingly normal", she says. "He's only 30. His mother and father were on the set every day. I told them I thought they were being very supportive of him. They said, no, that wasn't why they had come, but that it was the most interesting thing they could possibly be doing. They're very loving people, so he's very solid emotionally - and he's brilliant. "I don't understand why he's drawn to these dark places, because he's not like that at all. He is very intelligent and very conscious of what's going in the world around him, and I believe he's very aware that people are interested in exploring the hidden parts of the human psyche - the things we don't reveal in our own lives but which we are able to observe in movies."
Now 68, Ellen Burstyn was born Edna Rae Gillooly in Detroit, Michigan, and much later came to Ireland to explore her ancestry. "I went up to Leitrim, which is where the family comes from," she says. "I didn't know that until I got to Ireland and I found out at Kenny's book store in Galway. Isn't it a wonderful store? I took up that marvellous service they do, where they send you a package of books twice a year - Irish books that are not available outside Ireland. "They have a great big notebook and you sit down and you're interviewed for it and you tell them all your literary tastes and how much you want them to deduct from your charge account every year, and they send you a package twice a year. I just love it when it arrives. I get a lot of poetry, because that's what I like most.
"My great-grandfather came over to America in 1878. I saw the stones where his house stood in Leitrim. My mother's side was what they called Pennsylvania Dutch, which was really German. So it's a typical American family, mixing all those bloodlines."
She adopted a number of different names as she started out in show business. "Edna Rae Gillooly is not much of a theatrical name, is it?" she asks. "I was looking for something that suited me, I guess." She used the name Erica Dean for a very short time when she did a screen test for 20th Century Fox. The screen test didn't go anywhere, so neither did the name, she says. When she worked as a dancer in Montreal, she changed her name to Keri Flynn. "That is a very Irish name, isn't it? And then when I took up modelling, I just used Edna Rae. When I started acting they said that name didn't sound finished, and I said it wasn't, and they said I couldn't use Gillooly. So I changed it to Ellen Macrae. And then finally when I was married to Mr Burstyn, who was an actor and a writer, he was using a stage name, too. So I suggested that we all use the same name, Burstyn - my husband and me and our son. Right after that I started getting work as an actress, so I had to stop changing my name at that stage."
AFTER dancing and modelling, she set her heart on acting and walked right into a Broadway play, Fair Game. "I was given an audition and I was amazed when I got the part, the leading role in that comedy. That was in 1957. After I did that, I realised there was probably more to this acting than I'd expected and I should learn more about it."
She studied at the renowned Actors' Studio in New York, where many of her contemporaries are on the board today with her - Shelley Winters, Lee Grant, Estelle Parsons, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel. "It was a very exciting time there," she says. "It still is. Al, Harvey and I have just been elected co-presidents of the studio again. We're all so busy, so we decided to share it."
Burstyn worked in television before getting her breakthrough movie role as the emotionally frustrated woman who wants her daughter (played by Cybill Shepherd) to marry into a well-to-do family in Peter Bogdanovich's haunting 1971 The Last Picture Show, and she earned an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for her moving performance.
She followed it with key roles in Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens, Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto, and William Friedkin's The Exorcist, for which she received a best actress Oscar nomination. An unexpectedly huge commercial success at the time, The Exorcist went on to become one of the most lucrative reissues of the past decade.
"It's because there's something very deep about it," Burstyn believes. "It's not one of those superficial horror films where people are going, `Boo!'. It's about the ultimate confrontation between good and evil, and it comes from the depths of the people involved in it. There was a very strong atmosphere on the set when we made it, but it doesn't really unsettle me as an actor - the same is the case with Requiem For a Dream - because there is such a sense of accomplishment for the actors, that we're doing something really hard and pulling it off."
However, it rankles with her that The Exorcist has been so successfully rereleased without any additional payments going to the actors who worked so hard to give it credibility. "The actors have not had a cent from those re-releases," she says. "We get residuals if it's shown on television, and that's it. And because of its nature, it doesn't get shown on television very often."
The first woman to be elected president of US Actors' Equity, Burstyn thinks the threatened actors' strike may go ahead in June. "It's always very hard on both sides," she says, "but it's a very important negotiation because we haven't negotiated anything for 12 years and in that time all this new technology has come about which hasn't been negotiated before - cable, the Internet, DVD. I understand that the actors and producers are meeting and talking, but the writers are not."
How does she feel about the anomaly of so many actors working for peanuts on stage while others are making $25 million a picture, plus a hefty percentage of the profits. "I always say that there's nobody getting $25 million a film who doesn't deserve it," she says. "No studio would be paying anyone that if they weren't making more for themselves. It's the same in sports. There's obviously a lot of money there and it always gets focused on the people who are in front of the camera."
In the 1970s, Burstyn demonstrated her own enterprising nature when she recognised the potential of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore as a project for herself. She found the script by Robert Getchell, provided additional dialogue, chose the director (the young Martin Scorsese) and key cast (including Kris Kristofferson, Diane Ladd and a very young Jodie Foster), and sold the project to Warner Bros for 10 per cent of the profits.
"I don't want to take more of the credit than I deserve for that," she says. "I did bring the script to the studio and I did find Marty and bring him to the project. I was so impressed with what he had done on Mean Streets. I recognised his taste for reality, which is what I wanted for Alice. From then on, once Marty was on board, we worked together on it."
Her emotionally honest portrayal of a mistreated woman with dreams of a singing career won Burstyn the best actress Oscar for Alice in 1975, and she made history by becoming the first actress to win an Oscar and a Tony award in the same year when she received the Tony for her work in the Broadway production of the two-hander, Same Time, Next Year. The 1978 film version of that play secured her another Oscar nomination, as did the 1980 Resurrection, in which she played a woman who returns from the brink of death with extraordinary healing powers. In the 10 years between The Last Picture Show and Resurrection, Burstyn had received five Oscar nominations, winning once. The 1980s and 1990s proved to be a wilderness period for her as far as cinema was concerned, and she found herself working in mostly undemanding roles in generally forgettable movies, while continuing to act in theatre and television.
At the end of the 1990s, she returned to meatier movie roles when Darren Aronofsky cast her in Requiem For a Dream and James Gray gave a role in the New York crime saga, The Yards, which brings together three notable rising talents - Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Charlize Theron - with three established actors from an earlier generation - Faye Dunaway, James Caan and Ellen Burstyn.
"What is with that picture and the way people have taken against it?" Burstyn wonders about The Yards. "What did they expect? I think it's a very well-made film, very intelligent and the cast is so good. The American critics have been so negative about it, for whatever reason. Some of the reviews have been so vicious."
HER cinema comeback has been prompted by two young directors, each working on their second feature films, just as her best early roles were in movies by then emerging directors - Bogdanovich with The Last Picture Show, Bob Rafelson with The King of Marvin Gardens, and Martin Scorsese with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. "That's an interesting pattern, isn't it?" she says. "Of course, Alice was my doing because I asked for Marty to direct it."
The busy Burstyn has also been working on a new network television series for CBS, That's Life. "I like it very much, but I don't know how long it's going to run," she says. "The ratings have not been as good as they should be for a show that has been received as well as this has. The reviews have been very good. Maybe putting it out on Saturday nights at eight is the wrong time-slot for it. We've been opposite something big every week - the closing of the Olympics, the Miss America pageant, the World Series."
As for the Oscar nominations, to be announced on February 13th, she cannot disguise her anticipation of being back in the nominees' fold after 20 years away. Asked for her feelings about how she might fare when awards night rolls around on March 25th, she pauses and smiles before replying: "Don't you think it's time? It's been a very long time since Alice."
Requiem For a Dream is now showing at the IFC in Dublin.