Ellen Burstyn received the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on September 7, adding one of cinema’s most prestigious career honors to a six-decade body of work.
In remarks surrounding the honor, Burstyn focused less on collecting another trophy and more on how dramatically filmmaking has changed since she entered the business. She described sets that were once overwhelmingly male and credited the women’s movement with helping open more space for women behind and in front of the camera.
Her own career sits inside that history. Burstyn won the Academy Award for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, earned a Tony on stage and later added Emmy wins, making her one of the rare performers to complete acting’s so-called Triple Crown.
She also remains active rather than treating the Venice honor as a retirement marker. In 2026 she appears in Place to Be and in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short film Flesh Impact, where she plays an imagined 100-year-old Marilyn Monroe.
That role gave the Venice appearance an unusual symmetry: an actor looking back across decades of Hollywood while playing a version of one of its most mythologized stars who was never allowed to grow old.
Burstyn’s message was ultimately about distance traveled rather than a claim that the industry has finished changing. At 93, she used a lifetime-achievement stage to talk about the work still happening around who gets to make movies and whose stories get centered.
