Word: burstyn
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...Resnais's chief devices is the manipulation of point of view. Throughout the first segment, Gielgud's voice directs the jockeying between characters, writing and rewriting the scenes they act. Of all his subjects, Langham's daughter-in-law Sonia (Ellen Burstyn) is most completely a literary creation; deprived of a will of her own, she compounds her self-image from other people's imaginings. Her husband--"a sanctimonious sod," his father calls him--is a model of self-control, afraid of violence "because it reeks of spontaneity," of himself because his own urges to violence must be so vigorously...
ALREADY two different levels of reality appear at work--the "normal" interaction of these characters and Gielgud's obvious interpolations, his artistic mistakes. Gielgud is perfect here, capturing the petulance of the artist whose creative instincts have gone awry. In one scene, Burstyn unintentionally speaks in Gielgud's voice. In another, Warner's brother, a noted footballer, jogs through a bedroom, where Stritch and Bogarde are conversing, on his way to the bathroom. The funniest of these sequences occurs between Burstyn and Warner. As they sit on a park bench together, Warner exclaims with surprise, "I've got an erection...
...WHEN IT CAME DOWN TO IT MOST INTERESTING CONTEST OF THE EVENING AWARD: To the Battle of the Pageboys, waged between the permanent hair-dos of Oscar-presenters Tatum O'Neal, Ellen Burstyn and Anne-Margret...
Most of the movie takes place during one awful night in the sleepless imagination of a dying novelist (played with fierce relish by John Gielgud). Trying to construct a final fiction, his mind keeps moving his son (Bogarde), his son's wife (Ellen Burstyn), his bastard progeny (David Warner) and his own dead wife (Elaine Stritch) around a mythical country. His vision of his dear ones is, to say the least, misanthropic. They are cold, loveless creatures, incapable of responding to one another except by lobbing epigrams, Wildean in rhythm but not in wit, back and forth...
Pump People. The part had already been turned down by, among others, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Colleen Dewhurst and Geraldine Page, either because they considered the character, the steel-tempered nurse, offensive to women or because, on a more practical basis, the role was neither as large nor as strong as McMurphy's. Fletcher was not in a position to be choosy. At 41, she had appeared in only one previous film (a supporting part in Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us) and, indeed, had dropped out of acting almost entirely after making a bright start in television...