Ellen Burstyn shares secrets to her success — and long life — in interview with TV son Chris Meloni

In the seventh decade of her acting career, Ellen Burstyn has more work than ever.

The 90-year-old Oscar, Tony and Emmy Award-winner is beloved for her role of Bernie Stabler on "Law & Order: Organized Crime" and is reprising one of her most famous roles in the new sequel "The Exorcist: Believer."

Christopher Meloni, who plays Burstyn's TV son Elliot Stabler on "Organized Crime," spoke in Interview magazine with the legendary actor about the factors behind her longevity, some of her most famous performances and the one role she regrets turning down.

"This is so bizarre," Burstyn said. "I turn 91 in December and I’m busier than I can ever remember being at any point in my career. And I don’t understand it at all. I mean, what’s all this stuff about ageism in Hollywood? How did I get left out of it?"

Meloni asked her why she thinks her schedule is so full right now.

"I don’t know, except possibly that everybody else who could play those parts has already died, so I’m the only actress still standing who can play the great-grandmother or something," she joked.

Meloni, 62, and "The Exorcist" star have a playful back-and-forth on "Organized Crime," which extends to the set. She told Meloni she's more famous for doing "Law & Order" than anything she's done in her 70 years in the business.

"You know what I was thinking about yesterday? One day on set you said, 'Why do you do this to me, Dimi?' It’s a line from 'The Exorcist,'" Burstyn said. "And I was so stunned because my son in real life says that line to me. When you said it, it was like I was in two realities at once."

"Afterwards, I was like, 'Since I’ve lost my mother a couple of years ago, you— in my life, in our work — you’re my mother,'" Meloni said.

Last year, Meloni told TODAY.com that Burstyn is his "surrogate mother."

"I didn’t realize that. ... It kind of snuck up on me, crept up on me," he explained. "So, she’s a pro; it’s kind of effortless to work with her. She is a very interesting actress so that always, you know, I find that fascinating."

Burstyn also famously played a mother in the 1973 hit movie "The Exorcist," a horror classic in which her young daughter in the film, Regan (Linda Blair), becomes possessed by a demon. Burstyn's character, Chris MacNeil, pleads with priests to perform an exorcism to save her.

"It’s a human drama and a psychological drama," Burstyn told Meloni during their chat for Interview magazine. "It’s the only film I’ve made in my 70 years in the film business that’s in the Library of Congress. It’s a historical achievement."

Her role in "The Exorcist" was part of a fertile period in the 1970s in which she starred in "The Last Picture Show" and "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," the latter of which won her the best actress award at the 1975 Oscars.

She called that decade the favorite of her film career.

"That was when the studios were still run by filmmakers, not by corporations," she told Meloni. "And the scripts were submitted because somebody was interested in that story and wrote it, and a producer liked it and thought it would make a good movie. Not because it had been fed into a computer and said, 'Well, the first version made X number of millions, so the second one will make X number of millions and it has to have a big name.'"

She reprises her role of MacNeil in the new sequel "The Exorcist: Believer."

"First of all, I don’t know if anybody in the history of filmmaking has ever recreated a character they did 50 years ago," she said. "It sounds like a first to me.

"You don’t make a movie like that without going through a lot of real, emotional stuff. So the things that happened in that film, that touched on things from the first film, grabbed me."

Burstyn also reflected on the "horrible" British accent she once did for a show, and the legendary film she passed on.

She said she turned down the role of Nurse Mildred Ratched, the cruel nurse at a psychiatric institution played by Louise Fletcher in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The film swept all the major awards at the 1976 Oscars, and Fletcher won best actress for her performance.

"I was married to a mentally ill husband at the time, and I was spending a lot of time in mental hospitals and with other patients," Burstyn said. "And the idea of playing a mean nurse just rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t want to take on that particular psyche.

"It was the right decision at the time, but in hindsight it was hard to have missed that opportunity, because I’d won the Oscar the year before and thought, 'Could I have won two times in a row?'"

The "Requiem for a Dream" star also opened up about what has kept her going strong into her 90s. She said she regularly walks her dogs, reads, attends concerts and plays with friends, and welcomes guests.

She also steered clear of the excesses of Hollywood as she got older.

"Well, the secret of that is eating well, exercising, not drinking, not smoking, not doing drugs, and deciding to live healthy," she said. "That’s what I decided after doing all those bad things for a couple of decades."

Burstyn's outlook on life has also served her well.

"I try to have the first words out of my mouth be, 'Thank you,'" she said. "Thank you that I’m alive. Thank you that I’m safe. Thank you that I’m healthy. Thank you that I’m 90 and still going. Thank you for my doggies. I mean, I have a lot to live in a state of gratitude for."

This article was originally published on TODAY.com