Edward Burns

Biography

Edward Fitzgerald Burns was born January 29, 1968 in Woodside, Queens, New York. He is the second of three children of Molly (McKenna), who worked for the Federal Aviation Administration at Kennedy Airport, and Edward J. Burns, a police sergeant and active spokesperson for the New York Police Dept. He was raised Catholic, and is of Irish, and one eighth Swedish, descent. Edward, along with his older sister, Mary, and brother, Brian, were raised in Long Island. He attended Catholic Chaminade High School before transferring to a public high school. He went on to attend The State University of New York at Albany and Oneonta College in New York to major in English literature. During his junior year he transferred to Hunter College in Manhattan, studied filmmaking and began writing the first of many short films.Upon graduating, and through his father's connections, he secured a job at Entertainment Tonight (1981) (TV) in 1993 working at as a "go-fer". There he was able to finance and begin working on The Brothers McMullen (1995), a comedy focusing on the trials and tribulations facing three Irish-Catholic siblings. It was shot primarily in his parents' Long Island home with a cast of unknowns including Burns himself and his then-girlfriend Maxine Bahns. The feature was filmed over eight months' time with a reported budget of only $ 30,000. Rejected by a series of distributors, The Brothers McMullen (1995) bowed at Sundance, after Burns had given Robert Redford a copy of the film while working on ET. In 1995 his film won the festival's Grand Jury Prize, becoming one of the most successful independent efforts of the year. He then sold the film to 20th Century Fox's Searchlight Pictures.For his follow-up Burn's wrote and directed She's the One (1996), which retained much of…