Edward Burns

Award winning actor, writer, and director Edward Burns is known for his nostalgic and sometimes elegiac coming of age films set in Long Island and Queens. A native New Yorker, Burns grew up in Valley Stream, Long Island. After starting his undergraduate studies at SUNY Albany, Burns moved back to the New York City area and enrolled at Hunter College to study writing and filmmaking. He financed, produced, directed, and starred in his first film, The Brothers McMullen (1995), just after dropping out of Hunter and while working as a gofer on the television show Entertainment Tonight. His big break came on set during a taping of an ET interview with Robert Redford, where Burns slipped a copy of the film to the famous actor/director. The Brothers McMullen was a box-office success and won multiple awards.

Burns was a mere few credits shy of graduating when he left Hunter, and the school awarded him an honorary degree in 2002. Speaking at the graduation ceremony that year, Burns said Hunter’s top-notch education prepared him to compete on an equal footing with graduates of any university in the country.

In 1998, he co-starred in the Steven Spielberg World War II epic Saving Private Ryan. Other work includes She’s the One (1996), Sidewalks of New York (2001), Newlyweds (2011), Summer Days and Summer Nights (2021), and Bridge and Tunnel (2021).