Actress. Born Edna Rae Gillooly, on December 7, 1932, in Detroit, to a middle-class Irish family. At 18 she left home to seek fame and fortune as a model in Texas and New York, under the name Edna Rae. She became Keri Flynn when she danced in a Montreal nightclub chorus line and changed again to Erica Dean for a screen test in the mid-50's. In 1957 she broke the Broadway barrier, appearing in the play "Fair Game" under the name Ellen McRae. She retained the name through the mid-60's while acting in a couple of films and many TV programs, including "The Doctors" series, and finally became Ellen Burstyn when she entered her third, since aborted, marriage.
Her big breaks came after she had spent an interlude studying acting seriously with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She scored on the screen in the early 70's winning both the New York and the National Film Critics awards for her performance in The Last Picture Show. She was also nominated for Oscars for that film and for The Exorcist. Her career peaked in 1975, when at the age of 43, she won both the best actress Academy Award for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and the Broadway Tony Award for her performance in the play "Same Time, Next Year". She herself packaged Alice, found the script, provided additional dialogue, selected the director and players, and sold it to Warner Brothers for 10 percent of the profits. In the late 70's and early 80's she was nominated two more times for Oscars as best actress, for Same Time, Next Year and Resurrection. After Lee Strasberg's death in 1982, she was named co-artistic director (with Al Pacino) of the Actors Studio, a post she held until 1987. She served as president of Actors Equity from 1982 to 1985. In 1986 she starred in the TV comedy series "The Ellen Burstyn Show".
