Q&A: Ellen Burstyn on her acting life, and not retiring

Rarely has an actor been as good for as long as Burstyn has. She is still, at 88, tireless, her vitality almost preternaturally undiminished. As intense as her early career was — Lee Strasberg’s The Actors Studio in the late 1960s followed by ’70s classics like “The Last Picture Show,” “The Exorcist” and “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” — her later years have been no less probing or challenging — “Requiem for Dream,” “Interstellar,” last year’s “Pieces of a Woman.”

She has the awards to show for it. A six-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner (for “Alice,” a movie she might have directed until she picked a young filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, to do so instead), she has a Tony and two Emmys, too. And while “Queen Bees,” in theaters Friday, is more of fun diversion, Burstyn remains a magnificent and fierce screen presence. She plays a proudly independent senior temporarily staying at a retirement community that turns out to be as rife with comical cliques and romantic possibility as “Mean Girls.” The cast includes James Caan, Ann-Margret, Jane Curtin, Loretta Devine and Christopher Lloyd.

Burstyn’s own retirement plans aren’t just unmade. They’re unfathomable. When she turned 80, she decided to move from Rockland County, up the Hudson, into the city. “Time for a little action,” she explained in a recent interview by phone.