Why is Claire Underwood on “House of Cards” so awful? Ask her mother. We meet Claire’s mother, Elizabeth Hale, when the first lady travels to her childhood home in Texas. Claire wants to big-foot her way into the election by way of a Congressional seat in a predominantly black district. That her mother is undergoing chemo is a minor inconvenience. She’s prepared to sell the house from under Elizabeth to finance her ambitions. In one of the season’s best scenes, an obviously ailing Elizabeth rails at her impervious daughter. “Oh, you are such a disappointment,” she says, ripping off the turban she’s wearing, revealing a bald head. “I am the mother,” she screams. “I am the mother!” Elizabeth is played by Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn, whose casting is so perfect it makes you see how Claire turned into the elegant glacier she is today. “I think she wasn’t loved properly,” Burstyn tells The Post. “There’s an indication that she was her father’s favorite. Mama was jealous and withheld. When someone grows up with mama’s love withheld, it’s hard to have a normal love flow.” Burstyn, 83, had only seen Season 1 of “HOC,” but passersby in her Manhattan neighborhood chatted her up after they saw her in Episode 1. “I can’t walk my dog without people commenting on the show. I had no idea that it had that big a following,” she says. She also had no idea that she’d worked before with “HOC” star Kevin Spacey, but he was quick to remind her. The occasion was a 1990 TV movie called “When You Remember Me,” co-starring Fred Savage, of all people. “Kevin played a lawyer and I was a nurse defending a boy [Savage] in an orphanage,” she says. Burstyn had never worked with Robin Wright, but attests that she shares some traits with the formidable Claire. “Robin is a very reserved person, but she’s not mean,” Burstyn says. “She’s very kind. She loves directing more than acting, and is very popular with the crew.” Everyone knows Burstyn as the star of “The Exorcist,” but her TV career stretches back nearly 65 years to “The Jackie Gleason Show,” where she was a showgirl billed as Ellen McCrae (Burstyn was the last name of her second ex-husband, Neil). Besides loving Gleason, she terms it “one of the greatest experiences of my life.” Her own experiences as a series headliner left something to be desired. “The Ellen Burstyn Show,” in which she played a college professor, lasted one season on ABC in 1986. “It was not the right combination of people. It just did not come together, unfortunately,” she says. Once she found her groove as a film actress in “The Last Picture Show,” the critics — and the Motion Picture Academy — heaped praise on the Detroit-born actress. In addition to her Oscar, for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” she has five other Oscar nominations, two Emmys and a Tony. She admits to almost turning down one of her most remarkable roles — the drug-addicted Sara Goldfarb in “Requiem for a Dream” — because it was “too depressing,” but she’s proud that she took Francis Ford Coppola’s advice and agreed to the hiring of barely known Martin Scorsese to direct her in “Alice.” “I asked him, ‘What do you know about women? Because this is going to be from a female point of view,’ ” Burstyn remembers. “He said, ‘Nothing, but I’d like to learn.’ I said, ‘Right answer.’ “I had no idea he would turn out to be one of the great directors of our time.”
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