Q&A: Ellen Burstyn on her acting life, and never retiring

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That Ellen Burstyn plays a woman who recoils at the very mention of a retirement community in the upcoming film “Queen Bees” is extremely appropriate.

Rarely has an actor been as good for as long as Burstyn has. She is still, at 88, tireless, her vitality almost preternaturally undiminished. สล็อต happy As intense as her early career was — Lee Strasberg's The Actors Studio in the late 1960s followed by '70s classics like “The Last Picture Show,” “The Exorcist" and “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore” — her later years have been. no less probing or challenging — “Requiem for a Dream,” “Interstellar,” last year's “Pieces of a Woman.”

She has the awards to show for it. A six-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner (for “Alice,” a movie she might have directed until she picked a young filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, to do so instead), she has a Tony and two Emmys, too. And while “Queen Bees,” in theaters Friday, is more of fun diversion, Burstyn remains a magnificent and fierce screen presence. She plays a proudly independent senior temporarily staying at a retirement community that turns out to be as rife with comical cliques and romantic. possibility as “Mean Girls.” The cast includes James Caan, Ann-Margret, Jane Curtin, Loretta Devine and Christopher Lloyd.

Burstyn's own retirement plans aren't just unmade. They're unfathomable. When she turned 80, she decided to move from Rockland County, up the Hudson, into the city. “Time for a little action," she explained in a recent interview by phone.

She has since lived in an apartment overlooking Central Park, which she strolls daily. “It's my garden,” she says. During the pandemic, Burstyn has mostly laid low, spending time with friends in the Catskills and at a condo on the Connecticut waterfront.

“Otherwise, I've been in the city. I've been in my apartment," says Burstyn. "I am absolutely a cooped-up person ready to hit the road again.”