Ellen Burstyn, 93, Is One Grammy From an EGOT and Owns a Shelf to Prove It

Ellen Burstyn, 93, needs one Grammy to complete the EGOT, and she already knows where it would sit. "Yeah, it'll fit," she told Variety, giving a video tour of the shelf in question: "There's the Emmy, the Tony, the Golden Lion, the Oscar and the other Emmy." Nobody had asked to see it before. "That's the first time I've ever shown that to anybody," she said on the walk back.

The Oscar came for "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" and the Tony for "Same Time, Next Year" — both in 1975. The Emmys followed decades later, for "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" (2009) and "Political Animals" (2013). This September she accepted the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival, at the screening of Maggie Gyllenhaal's short "Flesh Impact," in which she plays Marilyn Monroe.

What stands between her and the EGOT?

One audiobook. "Poetry Says It Better: Poems to Help You Wake Up," published in April by HarperCollins, collects the poems that have carried Burstyn through nearly nine decades, from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Mary Oliver to Rumi, whose birthplace she once visited on pilgrimage. She read the audiobook herself — five hours and nine minutes — 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 pass John Gielgud, who was 87 when he completed the set, as the oldest EGOT winner ever. She would be the seventh woman, after Helen Hayes, Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Hudson and Viola Davis.

Burstyn hadn't been chasing the distinction. Her granddaughter had. "She said, 'You know, you're only one away from an EGOT. You should go for it, Grandma,'" Burstyn recalls. "I don't know how you 'go for it.' But 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."

What does poetry mean to her?

Asked what she loves about the poems, she didn't explain. She recited William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" from memory, straight to camera, start to finish. The poem hit her in high school. "I was just so reassured somehow that the stuff I was going through in my life at the time wasn't going to be forever," she says. "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 has never been nervous acting. Her first Broadway audition, in 1957, for a two-act comedy called "Fair Game," won her the lead. What changed her was leaving Hollywood for New York to study with Lee Strasberg (the acting teacher who developed Method acting). She is now co-president of the Actors Studio, and her advice to young actors is what she learned there: "A creative act comes from the heart."

The trophy shelf, though, doesn't satisfy her. "I could have done better," she says. "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. So I don't feel like a success." She wanted more of the great stage plays. "I'm disappointed that I didn't do that."

Is she done with 'The Exorcist'?

Emphatically. Mike Flanagan's "The Exorcist: Martyrs," with Scarlett Johansson, arrives next year, more than 53 years after Burstyn's Chris MacNeil anchored the original. "Isn't there enough already of the 'Exorcist' thing?" she says. "It's enough already."

Her closing argument to the Recording Academy is simpler. "I really enjoy reciting poetry and reading it, and I hope people will read the book," she says. "But I also hope they will listen to the recording that comes with the book — because I think poetry should be heard." A Grammy nomination announcement would tell us whether the shelf needs rearranging.