Ellen Burstyn is the American actress who played Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist and won an Oscar for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
Quick Specs
| Born | Edna Rae Gillooly, December 7, 1932, Detroit, Michigan |
| Trained | with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, from 1964 |
| Horror centerpiece | Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973) and The Exorcist: Believer (2023) |
| Other supernatural lead | Edna McCauley in Resurrection (1980) |
| Oscars | won Best Actress for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974 film); six nominations in all, including Best Actress for The Exorcist |
| Tony | Best Actress in a Play, Same Time, Next Year (1975) |
| Emmys | two wins (2009 and 2013), completing the Triple Crown of Acting |
| Leadership | president of Actors’ Equity (1982 to 1985); co-president of the Actors Studio since 2000 |
| Memoir | Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006) |
Who She Is
Edna Rae Gillooly was born in Detroit on December 7, 1932, to Correine and John Gillooly, with an older brother, Jack, and a younger one, Steve. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised by her mother and stepfather. At Cass Technical High School she studied fashion illustration, cheered, served on the student council and ran the drama club, then dropped out in her senior year after failing her classes. She left home in 1950.
Her names map her career. She danced as Kerri Flynn and modeled into her early twenties. She was a dancing girl on The Jackie Gleason Show (1955 to 1956) as Erica Dean, and made her Broadway debut as Ellen McRae. “Burstyn” came from her 1964 marriage to the actor and writer Neil Burstyn, and she first used it on screen in 1970. She was married three times, to William Alexander, the director Paul Roberts and Neil Burstyn, and she and Roberts adopted a son, Jefferson. Back in New York in 1964 she began studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, the institution she would later run.
The Work, and What She Did in It
Her Broadway debut was Fair Game (1957). A decade of television guest work and small film parts followed, including Perry Mason and Vincente Minnelli’s Goodbye Charlie (1964). She was first credited as Ellen Burstyn in Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970) and played Mona in Tropic of Cancer the same year. She was 38, with a whole working life behind her, and the breakthrough was a year away.
It came with Lois Farrow, the embittered mother in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), and her first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress. She played Sally opposite Jack Nicholson in The King of Marvin Gardens (1972).
Then came The Exorcist (1973), William Friedkin’s film of William Peter Blatty’s novel. She is Chris MacNeil, a successful actress and divorced mother in Georgetown whose 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair) is possessed. Chris is the film’s way in and its engine: the parent who exhausts medicine, then psychiatry, and finally begs a doubting priest, Father Karras (Jason Miller), for an exorcism the Church has to be persuaded to allow. The horror plays across her face in ordinary rooms, which is why the set pieces land. She fought for the part. Shirley MacLaine had been passed over, and others had been considered; Burstyn told Friedkin she was “destined” to play Chris and talked about her lapsed Catholic upbringing, and studio head Ted Ashley gave in when no one else emerged. Her screen test with Jason Miller, in the scene where Chris first tells Karras she believes Regan is possessed, won Miller his role. Released December 26, 1973, The Exorcist became the first horror film nominated for Best Picture and for years the highest-grossing horror film ever made. Burstyn was nominated for Best Actress.
She won the next year, for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), as Alice Hyatt, a widow who takes her son on the road to restart her singing career and ends up waitressing in Phoenix. The film exists because of her. Warner Bros. president John Calley sent her the much-rejected script; she championed it, was given choice of director and final script approval, asked for qualified women in key crew jobs, and, on Francis Ford Coppola’s suggestion, chose Martin Scorsese, fresh off Mean Streets, who told her he knew nothing about women and wanted to learn. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA. Scorsese called it “one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” She was also Shirley Mallard in Harry and Tonto (1974).
On Broadway she created Doris opposite Charles Grodin in Same Time, Next Year and won the 1975 Tony for Best Actress in a Play, which made 1975 the year she won both the Oscar and the Tony. She was the third woman to do that in a single year. The 1978 film, opposite Alan Alda, brought a Golden Globe win and another Best Actress nomination.
After Alain Resnais’s Providence (1977) came her other supernatural lead, Resurrection (1980), directed by Daniel Petrie from Lewis John Carlino’s script and released September 26, 1980. Edna McCauley survives the car crash that kills her husband, briefly dies, and comes back paralyzed and able to heal by touch. She recovers, settles in rural Kansas and becomes a healer who insists her gift is the power of love, not God, which sets her against her fundamentalist father (Roberts Blossom) and her lover Cal (Sam Shepard), whose religious obsession turns dangerous. It’s The Exorcist turned inside out, with the supernatural in a woman’s own hands, played naturalistically. Burstyn helped develop it and pushed for Carlino’s rewrite, and it brought Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. It flopped on release and has since been reclaimed as one of her finest performances.
The 1980s brought television eminence, with Emmy nominations for The People vs. Jean Harris (1981) and Pack of Lies (1987). She played opposite Gene Hackman in Twice in a Lifetime (1985) and hosted Saturday Night Live in December 1980. Her 1990s films included Dying Young (1991), When a Man Loves a Woman (1994) and How to Make an American Quilt (1995).
In Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000) she is Sara Goldfarb, a lonely Brighton Beach widow whose hoped-for game-show appearance curdles into an amphetamine diet-pill addiction as consuming as her son’s heroin habit. The red dress she starves herself to fit is the film’s defining image of her, and the part brought her sixth Oscar nomination, twenty years after her fifth. She played Barbara Bush in Oliver Stone’s W. (2008). Her Emmy wins came for a guest role as Bernadette Stabler, a mother with bipolar disorder, on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2009), and for Margaret Barrish in Political Animals (2013), completing the Triple Crown. Among her later Emmy nominations is the grandmother Olivia Foxworth in Flowers in the Attic (2014).
In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) she is Murph in old age: first an unidentified voice among the documentary-style witnesses remembering the blight, then the dying woman in the final reunion, older than the father who left her. She went on to The Age of Adaline (2015), The Tale (2018) and Pieces of a Woman (2020).
Fifty years after the original, she came back as Chris in David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer (2023). Chris is now an author who has written about Regan’s possession and is drawn in by a father (Leslie Odom Jr.) whose daughter and her friend are possessed together. She confronts the demon in the girls’ hospital room and is blinded in the attack, and the film closes on her reunion with the adult Regan, with Linda Blair in a closing cameo.
Cool Verified Facts
- She said Friedkin “was always great with me, except when he permanently injured my spine” (her line in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). When Friedkin died in 2023 she called him “truly extraordinary… a true genius.” She has said both, and both stand.
- She was president of Actors’ Equity from 1982 to 1985 and has been co-president of the Actors Studio since 2000, alongside Al Pacino and now Alec Baldwin.
- She is in the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame (1997) and the American Theatre Hall of Fame (2013).
- She never appeared in The Exorcist television series. Her return to the franchise is Believer.
- Her six Oscar nominations span 1971 to 2000.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
The fall in The Exorcist is her story to tell. In the scene where the possessed Regan throws Chris to the floor, a rig around Burstyn’s waist was yanked by wire. After one hard landing she told Friedkin, “Billy, he’s pulling me too hard.” He answered, “Well, it has to look real.” She warned she could get hurt. On the next take she landed on her coccyx, and her real scream is in the finished film, with the camera moving in on her pain, which she has said made her furious. By her own account the injury did lasting damage, and she has said she has always had trouble with her back since.
She has described how she survived the eight-month shoot. While the crew relit for close-ups, she turned her chair to the wall, put on a radio headset and listened to music with her eyes closed “so that I could stay on the same emotional level.”
She also turned the sequel offer into an endowment. She has said she turned down “many versions” of an Exorcist sequel. Offered a lot of money for Believer, she said no again. When the offer doubled, she said, “The next thought that came to mind was: ‘I feel like the devil is asking my price.’ And the next thought was, ‘My price is a scholarship program for talented students at our master’s degree program at Pace University.'” The Actors Studio’s MFA is at Pace, where she teaches. “I’ve got a scholarship program for young actors,” she said.
The Actors Studio runs through her life: Strasberg’s student in 1964, Equity president in the 1980s, the Studio’s co-president from 2000, and in 2023 the funder of its scholarships with an Exorcist paycheck.
Why She Matters
Ellen Burstyn is the human center of The Exorcist. The priests argue theology, but Chris is why anyone in the audience is afraid: a working mother watching medicine fail her child in real time. Her nomination put her in the first horror cast the Academy took seriously as actors, in the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture.
She is one of the defining actresses of the New Hollywood and one of the few women of that era with documented power: five Oscar-recognized performances in a decade, a win on a film she steered from the start, and the Oscar and the Tony in the same year.
And her longevity is the argument. Six Oscar nominations spanning 29 years, Emmy wins in her late seventies and eighties, Interstellar’s closing scene at 81, and Chris MacNeil again at 90. Resurrection gives horror fans a second, underseen supernatural classic that is hers outright.