Ellen Burstyn, 93, Accepts Venice’s Golden Lion by Becoming Marilyn Monroe

Ellen Burstyn received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, and she did not collect it from a distance. At 93, she accepted the honor bound to a new performance: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 17-minute short Flesh Impact, screened at the Lido, in which Burstyn plays Marilyn Monroe imagined at 100, auditioning alone on a bare stage. The award and the role arrived together, which is the most Burstyn thing imaginable — a career prize accepted not as a summing-up but as more work.

Gyllenhaal described the piece as watching an actor do “basically the most vulnerable things an actor can do,” and Burstyn met the assignment with the seriousness she has brought to everything since the 1950s. Her reading of Monroe was not sentimental. “She created the whole concept of Marilyn Monroe and played it,” Burstyn said — one great actor recognizing the constructed performance inside another’s fame. She also recalled seeing Monroe once, in a nightclub: “I felt that she recognized me. I just felt so honored and pleased.”

That instinct — the persona as a role to be built and inhabited — runs straight back to her training, and Burstyn made sure the credit went there. “I wouldn’t have had this career without my training,” she said, pointing to the legacy of Lee Strasberg and the Method that shaped her at the Actors Studio, which she went on to lead. It is the through-line of a filmography that never coasted on presence alone: she worked from the inside out, every time.

The body of work behind the Lion is enormous — roughly 150 films across more than fifty years. She broke through in The Last Picture Show, terrified audiences as the mother in The Exorcist, won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in 1975, delivered one of cinema’s most harrowing performances in Requiem for a Dream, and turned up decades later, undimmed, in Interstellar. Six Oscar nominations, five of them for Best Actress; a Tony; two Emmys. Alberto Barbera, in choosing her, called Burstyn “an actress of rare intensity and truth” who has “been a presence in American cinema for over fifty years.”

What makes the Monroe short more than a stunt is precisely that through-line. Venice’s honorary Lion has gone to the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Deneuve and Ridley Scott — names collected, as a rule, at the far end of a career, the trophy standing in for the work. Burstyn refused that arrangement. To take the prize by disappearing into a hundred-year-old Monroe, “doing basically the most vulnerable things an actor can do,” is to insist that the training still functions, that the instrument is still tuned, that a lifetime award need not mean the lifetime is over. Few honorees at ninety-three would accept the exposure; fewer still would treat it as the point.

She used the platform to look outward, too, crediting — in her words — “blessed Gloria Steinem” for the change in consciousness that reshaped film sets, and noting how differently a set treats its women now than when she started. It was of a piece with the day: a legend receiving the industry’s oldest laurel and, in the same breath, insisting the work and the fight are ongoing.

The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement is Venice’s highest honor outside the competitive prizes; this year’s Golden Lion for best film is decided on 12 September by the jury Gyllenhaal presides over.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Marilyn Monroe, Golden Lion, Ellen Burstyn, Maggie Gyllenhaal