Ellen Burstyn to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award in Venice

Few actors have travelled through American cinema with the quiet endurance and emotional force of Ellen Burstyn. This September, the 83rd Venice International Film Festival will honor the 93-year-old actress with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, recognizing a career that has crossed more than six decades of film, television and theatre. The award was approved by the Board of La Biennale di Venezia following a recommendation from festival artistic director Alberto Barbera.

For Burstyn, the recognition arrives as more than a celebration of the past. She remains an active performer, and her presence at Venice will connect the extraordinary length of her career with work that is still unfolding.

Burstyn emerged as one of the defining American actresses of the 1970s. Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show brought her major recognition, while William Friedkin’s The Exorcist placed her at the centre of one of the most influential films of its era. Her performance in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1975. That same year she also won a Tony Award for Same Time, Next Year, becoming only the third woman at the time to win an Oscar and a Tony in the same year.

Her later work proved equally fearless. In Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, Burstyn transformed Sara Goldfarb into one of the most painful portraits of loneliness and addiction in contemporary American cinema. She would continue appearing in films ranging from Interstellar to Pieces of a Woman, resisting the idea that age should limit either the complexity or visibility of an actress.

That makes Venice’s choice especially fitting. Barbera has praised Burstyn for the “intensity and truth” of her performances and for bringing complexity to women living through personal and social change. Her career now includes around 150 screen roles, while her commitment to acting extends beyond performance itself. Burstyn currently serves as co-president of the Actors Studio alongside Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin, continuing a long relationship with one of America’s most influential institutions for actors.

The Golden Lion will be presented in connection with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short film Flesh Impact, which commemorates the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth. Dakota Johnson plays Monroe at the height of her fame, while Burstyn portrays an imagined older version of Marilyn, a woman the world never had the opportunity to see.

There is something beautifully appropriate about that role. Monroe remains frozen in cinema history at 36. Burstyn arrives in Venice at 93, carrying decades of experience and still standing before the camera. One represents the life cinema could only imagine continuing; the other represents what artistic longevity can actually become.

Burstyn will also appear in Kornél Mundruczó’s Place to Be, alongside Taika Waititi, Pamela Anderson, Murray Bartlett and David Wenham.

So Venice is not simply closing a chapter with a lifetime achievement award. It is honoring an actress whose history is already monumental, while acknowledging that her relationship with cinema remains very much alive.

The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs from September 2 to 12, 2026.