‘I feel like everyone’s rooting for me’
Glenn Close talks about her film ‘The Wife’
NEW YORK - Glenn Close stands doubled over laughing in the doorway to her downtown Manhattan apartment while her loyal white Havanese, Pip, circles an arriving reporter.
It’s star time for both. Close, among the most accomplished performers never to win an Oscar, may finally break through with “The Wife,” in which, ironically, she plays a deferential spouse (to an acclaimed author, played by Jonathan Pryce) who has been long overlooked. The never-nominated Pip has developed his own following, thanks in part to an appearance on “The View.” The dog’s Instagram account, under the name “Sir Pippin of Beanfield,” is up to 3,400 followers.
Inside, Close hands the reporter a bottle of red wine to open as she recounts how hours earlier, while walking Pip in a park, a lady stopped her to relate her own story of being held back in her profession by a man. These are the kinds of stories Close has heard a lot since “The Wife” came out and since she gave a showstopping acceptance speech at the Golden Globes where she spoke movingly about how her mother sublimated herself to Close’s father, a prominent surgeon. “Another woman crossing the street was like, ‘I love you, Glenn!”’ says Close. “People down in the pharmacy, they’re all cheering me on.”
Seemingly everyone knows that Close, 71, has emerged as the best actress front-runner after early buzz favoured Lady Gaga for “A Star is Born.” ”The Wife“may be a modest independent film ($9 million at the box office, and still playing six months after opening), but the moment feels finely tailored to Close, the mostnominated living actor never to win an Oscar.
What would an Academy Award mean to her? She pauses.
“It would mean a lot but I wouldn’t want it to be a pity Oscar because I’ve been an actress for 45 years,” says Close, whose previous honours include three Tony awards, three Emmys and three Globes. “People have been going back and looking at my basic body of work and the six times I lost and what those roles were. So I can’t pretend it’s just for ‘The Wife.’ But I feel like everybody’s rooting for me.”
But that’s not to say Close will be crestfallen if she doesn’t win. She smiles. “I’ve decided if I lose, I’m going to look at the camera and say: ‘I’m OK.”’
And she is. Much more than OK, even. Making “The Wife” has been its own cathartic, empowering experience for Close.
“It’s taken me a long time to gain control of my own life. When I made ‘The Wife,’ I was in control of my own life for probably the first time,” says Close. “I felt like I had new wings. Or maybe my wings were finally developed.”
That’s a startling pronouncement for an actress who has for decades been one of the most versatile and subtle actors of film, television and theatre. A late bloomer, she didn’t act in her first film until age 35. But since, Close has unfailingly embodied intelligence and depth in everything from her early breakthroughs in “The World According to Garp” and “The Big Chill” to “Sunset Boulevard” (twice on stage, decades apart; she hopes to make a film of the musical this year); from her ruthless attorney on “Damages” to her infamous Alex Forrest in “Fatal Attraction.”
“Nobody thought I could be sexy,” Close says of the time before 1987’s “Fatal Attraction,” a film she’d like to see remade from the woman’s perspective rather than the sympathetic point-ofview of Michael Douglas’ cheating husband.
“In making the movie a hit, I basically had to betray what I thought was the essence of that character,” says Close.