Ellen Barkin

Info

Full Name: Ellen Rona Barkin
Date of birth: April 16, 1954 (72 years old)
Location: New York City, New York
Country: USA

Ellen Barkin has been active for 41 years, participating in 18 movies that average a 6.3/10 score.

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Biography

She studied acting for ten years before she went to a single audition. 'Time' printed that detail once she was famous, and it says a fair amount about the sort of actor she is. No early luck, no accidental discovery.

Born in the Bronx on 16 April 1954, she grew up in Flushing, out in Queens. Her father, Sol Barkin, sold chemicals; her mother, Evelyn, worked in hospital administration. The family was Jewish, having come from Siberia and the Ukrainian-Polish border, and had no connection to the film business whatsoever.

Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts came first, then Hunter College, where she took a double major in history and drama, and after that the Actors Studio. By the time she finally turned up in a film she was twenty-seven.

Diner and the eighties

It was worth the wait. 'Diner' (1982) was Barry Levinson's directing debut, a portrait of five Baltimore friends who keep meeting at the same cafe. Barkin played Beth, wife to Daniel Stern's character and more or less the only female voice in a cast that took in Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, Paul Reiser and Tim Daly.

A year on she was in Bruce Beresford's 'Tender Mercies' (1983), the film that won Robert Duvall his Oscar. Then came 'Eddie and the Cruisers' (1983), Sidney Lumet's 'Daniel', and 'Harry & Son' (1984) alongside Paul Newman.

Another part was Penny Priddy in 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension' (1984), the science fiction oddity with Peter Weller, John Lithgow and Jeff Goldblum that flopped on release and turned into a cult item afterwards.

In 1986 she shot Jim Jarmusch's 'Down by Law', with Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni, and in the same year 'Desert Bloom'. Next she led 'The Big Easy' opposite Dennis Quaid, as the prosecutor investigating the New Orleans police while sleeping with one of their detectives. Those two performances won her Spain's Sant Jordi award for best foreign actress.

The decade finished with 'Siesta' (1987) and with 'Sea of Love' (1989), Harold Becker's thriller in which she shares a bed and a murder investigation with Al Pacino. It's probably the part most people remember her for. That same year she played a prostitute in Walter Hill's 'Johnny Handsome', with Rourke, Morgan Freeman and Forest Whitaker.

A Golden Globe nod for changing bodies

The hardest role of her career to summarise arrived in 1991. In Blake Edwards's 'Switch' she played a murdered womaniser sent back into the world inside a woman's body, with Jimmy Smits and JoBeth Williams. It brought her a Golden Globe nomination for best actress in a comedy.

What followed was patchier. The year 1992 brought 'Mac', 'Man Trouble' with Jack Nicholson and 'Into the West'. Then came one of her best parts, as Leonardo DiCaprio's mother in Michael Caton-Jones's 'This Boy's Life' (1993), a woman who drags her son from state to state and lands him with an unbearable stepfather played by Robert De Niro.

Calamity Jane came next, in 'Wild Bill' (1995), Walter Hill again and Jeff Bridges in the title role, followed by the sports reporter in 'The Fan' (1996) and one of the gangsters in 'Mad Dog Time' (1996), where she worked opposite her husband at the time, Gabriel Byrne.

Television handed her the bigger prize. For 'Before Women Had Wings' (1997), an Oprah Winfrey production in which she played an alcoholic, battered mother, she won the 1998 Emmy for lead actress and took another Golden Globe nomination. Around it she turned up as a waitress in Terry Gilliam's 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' (1998) and as Kirsten Dunst's mother in 'Drop Dead Gorgeous' (1999).

A production company, a lawsuit and a Tony

Solid supporting work filled the 2000s: 'Animal Attraction' (2001) with Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman; Todd Solondz's 'Palindromes' (2004); Spike Lee's 'She Hate Me' (2004); and 'Trust the Man' (2005), with Julianne Moore, David Duchovny and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Al Pacino's second in command in Steven Soderbergh's 'Ocean's Thirteen' (2007) was hers, as was the FBI agent leaning on Don Cheadle in Antoine Fuqua's 'Brooklyn's Finest' (2009).

In 2005 she set up a production company, Applehead Pictures, with her brother George and her husband of the time. Out of it came 'Letters to Juliet' (2010) and 'Another Happy Day' (2011), the directing debut of Sam Levinson, which she also led with Demi Moore, Kathy Bates and Ezra Miller. The company ended up in court: Barkin sued her ex-husband, a judge found in her favour to the tune of roughly four million dollars, and the parties eventually settled.

Her best year was 2011, and no film was involved. She made her Broadway debut in 'The Normal Heart', Larry Kramer's play about the early years of Aids, as Dr Emma Brookner, a wheelchair-bound physician watching her patients die while nobody listens to her. It won her the Tony for best featured actress in a play, plus the Drama Desk, Theatre World and Outer Critics Circle awards.

Smurf, Oliver Stone and what comes next

The longest job of her career came from television. From 2016 to 2019 she was Janine "Smurf" Cody in 'Animal Kingdom', matriarch of a family of southern Californian armed robbers who handles her sons and her grandson with a mix of emotional blackmail and outright threat. Jacki Weaver had originated the character in the Australian film the series was based on.

Smurf died at the end of the fourth season, shot by her own grandson. Showrunner John Wells said the decision was a creative one, though Barkin made her own view reasonably clear on Twitter by liking a run of furious viewer posts and adding a line that covered it: the next episode would open Smurf's will, and it would turn out she'd left her boys a hit TV show.

Elsewhere she did 'Modern Family' (2012), Ryan Murphy's 'The New Normal' (2012), 'Happyish' (2015) and an episode of 'Poker Face' (2023), Rian Johnson's series with Natasha Lyonne.

Short film roles have kept coming: 'Very Good Girls' (2013), 'The Cobbler' (2014) with Adam Sandler, 'Hands of Stone' (2016), 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks' (2017), 'The Man from Toronto' (2022) and 'The Out-Laws' (2023), as a bank-robbing mother-in-law opposite Pierce Brosnan.

What's next is the most interesting thing on her slate in years. She's in the cast of 'White Lies', the first feature Oliver Stone has made since 2016, a family drama led by Josh Hartnett with Michael Douglas, Willem Dafoe and Leila George, who had played the young Smurf on 'Animal Kingdom'. Shooting ran across Rome, Bangkok and Sofia and wrapped in June 2026. No release date has been announced.

Her private life has been public enough. Married to Gabriel Byrne from 1988, separated in 1993 and divorced in 1999, the two have stayed friends and have two children: Jack, born in 1989 and a blues musician, and Romy, born in 1992 and an actress. A second marriage, to the businessman Ronald Perelman, ran from 2000 to 2006 and ended in that production company lawsuit. Barkin turned seventy-two in April, rarely gives interviews, and holds nothing back on social media.