Ellen Burstyn, 93, Receives Venice's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement

Ellen Burstyn walked onto the stage of the Sala Grande on Monday afternoon leaning on a walker and wearing a canary-yellow gown, then stood through several minutes of sustained applause before accepting the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. She is 93, and the honor arrived on the same afternoon her latest screen performance — as an imagined elder Marilyn Monroe in a short film commissioned to mark what would have been Monroe's 100th birthday — had its world premiere a few hundred feet away.

The award, confirmed in an announcement from La Biennale di Venezia, was presented on the recommendation of artistic director Alberto Barbera, who described Burstyn as an actress "of rare intensity and truth" whose work has brought "depth and complexity to unforgettable female characters" for more than five decades. It is the second Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement handed out at this year's festival; George Clooney received the first at the opening ceremony on September 2.

A Career Measured in Decades, Not Roles

Burstyn's filmography runs to roughly 150 titles, beginning in television in the early 1960s and running through this year's Venice lineup. She won the Academy Award for best actress for Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" in 1975, a Tony Award for "Same Time, Next Year" the same year, and two Emmy Awards, making her one of a small number of performers to hold what the industry calls acting's Triple Crown. She was nominated for an Oscar a total of six times, including for "The Exorcist," "Same Time, Next Year," "Resurrection" and "Requiem for a Dream," and has been a co-president of The Actors Studio alongside Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin since 2000.

Those numbers were the backdrop to Monday's ceremony, but Burstyn used her time at the podium less to recite them than to describe how differently they were earned. "You just can't imagine how meaningful this is to me," she said, according to Variety's account of the ceremony.

"It's one thing to win an Oscar, a Tony or an Emmy — all of which I've won. But this ... it's a lot."

Playing Marilyn Monroe at 100

The Golden Lion ceremony was paired with the festival premiere of "Flesh Impact," a 17-minute short directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal — who is also president of this year's Venice competition jury — in which Dakota Johnson plays Monroe at the peak of her fame and Burstyn plays an imagined version of the star grown old, an age Monroe never reached before her death in 1962 at 36. The project originated as a commission from the automaker Genesis, whose executives approached Gyllenhaal about marking Monroe's centennial; according to a press release from the brand's newsroom, the brief was to let Monroe "express something, to articulate herself as an artist in a way that she was not given when she was alive." Gyllenhaal has said she considered Burstyn first for the role. Burstyn, who never met Monroe but recalled once seeing her at a nightclub, described her reason for taking the part in characteristically plain terms: "It sounded like a good idea to me," she told reporters, a remark carried in The Hollywood Reporter's coverage of the Venice press day.

Reflections on Sixty Years Behind and In Front of the Camera

Much of Burstyn's remarks, on stage and in a subsequent press conference, dwelt on how much the industry has changed since she began working. "When I first started working, which was 150 years ago, there were no women on the set," she said. "There were no women crew. There was nobody, no woman behind the camera. It was all men." She credited the women's movement, and the activist Gloria Steinem in particular, with reshaping who gets hired behind the camera, adding that crews now include women "handling heavy equipment without even thinking about it." She also reached for a decades-old memory to make a more pointed comment about the country's current direction. Recalling a night during the 1974 filming of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," when she drove a car up a mountain road in the dark with Scorsese and crew perched on the hood, unable to see the cliff's edge except by fixing on the center stripe of the pavement, Burstyn told the Venice audience, as Deadline reported from the ceremony: "I pray that my own country will, very soon, find its own white line."

What Happens Next

Burstyn is not treating the Golden Lion as a farewell lap. Her feature "Place to Be," a road-trip drama from director Kornél Mundruczó co-starring Taika Waititi and Pamela Anderson, is scheduled for its own world premiere at the festival on September 9 — meaning she will spend the back half of Venice's closing week promoting a new film rather than simply accepting tributes to old ones. "Flesh Impact" is expected to screen further on the festival circuit before a wider release tied to the continuing centennial observances of Monroe's birth. For Gyllenhaal, the short adds a directing credit to a year already defined by her role presiding over the Venice jury that will hand out the festival's Golden Lion for best film later this week. For Burstyn, the Venice honor joins a Triple Crown resume that, by her own account, she is still adding to on her own terms — reading new scripts, she said, for the same reason she always has: to see whether they make her laugh, cry, or both.