I asked Ellen Burstyn where a Grammy would go, if she ever won one. She stands up to show me. Her assistant, Caitlin, gets the camera turned around, and the Zoom window swings from a living room into a study.
Burstyn, 93, narrates as she goes, approaching the wall of statues. And then these are my nominations up there,” pointing to dozens of certificates and plaques. I tell her the good news is that the Grammy is smaller than most of those, so it won’t take up as much room.
Then, during the walk back: “That’s the first time I’ve ever shown that to anybody. Nobody asked before.” Burstyn won her Oscar for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and her Tony for “Same Time, Next Year” in the same year, 1975. Her two Emmys came decades later, for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (2009) and “Political Animals” (2013).
This past September she accepted the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival, presented at the screening of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short “Flesh Impact,” in which she plays Marilyn Monroe. This leaves one letter in the entertainment gold standard. Vincent Millay to Mary Oliver to Rumi, whose birthplace she once made a pilgrimage to see.
She read the audiobook herself — five hours and nine minutes of it — and it earned a Kirkus Star and an Earphones Award. It is now a contender for the Grammy for best audiobook, narration and storytelling recording. If she wins, Burstyn, who turns 94 in December, would complete her EGOT and become the oldest person ever to do it, passing John Gielgud, who was 87.
She would be the seventh woman, after Helen Hayes, Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Hudson and Viola Davis. Burstyn hadn’t been thinking about any of that. But her granddaughter had.
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