Source : @Variety
LOS ANGELES — Veteran actor Ellen Burstyn is one Grammy away from joining the select group of EGOT winners, with her self-narrated poetry audiobook now in contention at the Recording Academy’s awards, Variety reported on Thursday (Oct 22).
The audiobook of “Poetry Says It Better: Poems to Help You Wake Up”, Burstyn’s personal collection published in April by HarperCollins, is a contender for the Grammy for best audiobook, narration and storytelling recording. If she wins, Burstyn, who is 93 and turns 94 in December, would complete the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony set and become the oldest person ever to do so, passing John Gielgud, who was 87.
She would also become only the seventh woman to achieve the feat, after Helen Hayes, Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Hudson and Viola Davis.
“It is thrilling. I understand only six women have ever gotten an EGOT. That’s quite a special event, so I’m all for it,” Burstyn told Variety. She said it was her granddaughter who first raised the idea. “She said, ‘You know, you’re only one away from an EGOT. You should go for it, Grandma.’ I don’t know how you ‘go for it.’”
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” in 2009 and “Political Animals” in 2013. In September she accepted the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival.
The book gathers the poems that have carried her through nearly nine decades, from Edna St Vincent Millay and Mary Oliver to Rumi. Burstyn read the five-hour, nine-minute audiobook herself, and it has earned a Kirkus Star and an Earphones Award. She traced her love of poetry to reading William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” in high school. “That went into my heart, and gave me such confidence that my life was going to change. That started my life as a poetry lover,” she said.
Despite her trophy shelf, Burstyn, who is co-president of the Actors Studio, said she did not see herself as a success. “I could have done better. There are things I didn’t do that I should have done, and things that Lee Strasberg encouraged me to do that I wish I had done,” she said, adding that she wished she had played more of the great stage roles.
Asked about Mike Flanagan’s upcoming “The Exorcist: Martyrs”, starring Scarlett Johansson and due next year, more than 53 years after she played Chris MacNeil in the original horror classic, Burstyn was blunt. “Isn’t there enough already of the ‘Exorcist’ thing?” she said. “It’s enough already.”
She closed with a message for Recording Academy voters. “I really enjoy reciting poetry and reading it, and I hope people will read the book,” she said. “But I also hope they will listen to the recording that comes with the book — because I think poetry should be heard.”
The original Variety post can be viewed on X: https://x.com/Variety/status/2113423909970194460.
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