“Wow! Not only do I get to travel to one of my favourite cities in the world… but I go home clutching a Golden Lion in my arms!” The exclamation, relayed by the Venice Biennale on Tuesday, came from Ellen Burstyn, the 93-year-old American actress, upon learning she would receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. The award, the second career honour announced this year after George Clooney’s, will be presented during a gala screening of Flesh Impact, a short film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal—who also presides over this edition’s competition jury—in which Burstyn plays a version of Marilyn Monroe the world never saw.

The short, whose title derives from an old term for Monroe’s on-screen aura so tangible it seemed viewers could touch her, marks the centenary of the star’s birth. Burstyn appears alongside Dakota Johnson as Monroe at the height of her fame, offering what festival director Alberto Barbera called “another extraordinary demonstration of her exceptional interpretative talent.” The casting folds one icon into another: Burstyn, whose own career ignited in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) and detonated globally with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), has spent more than fifty years giving depth and complexity to female characters that, in Barbera’s words, “embody the contradictions and transformations of the contemporary woman.”

That trajectory earned her an Academy Award for Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), a film about reclaiming identity and freedom, and made her the third woman in history to win both a Tony and an Oscar in the same year. She later added two Emmys, entering the small club of performers with the “Triple Crown of Acting.” Her collaborators form a map of auteur cinema: Alain Resnais, Paul Schrader, Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan. As co-president of the Actors Studio, Burstyn has long championed a method built on emotional truth, listening, and generosity toward her characters—an approach Barbera described as transforming “fragility and methodical discipline into the tools of a performance style based on emotional truth.”

The Venice recognition, then, is not merely a valedictory lap. It arrives at a moment when the festival, under Barbera’s direction, has consistently used its lifetime awards to reframe legacies. By pairing Burstyn’s honour with the premiere of a film that imagines an unseen Monroe, the Mostra invites audiences to consider the layers of performance and persona that both women navigated. For Burstyn, who has played mothers, survivors, and seekers across more than 150 screen roles, the award underscores a career spent illuminating what Barbera called “everyday pain and resilience with dignity, irony, and courage.”

When she takes the stage in September, the Golden Lion in her arms, the moment will echo the title of the short that brought her there: a flesh impact, a reminder that screen acting can feel as real and luminous as something you might reach out and touch.