Glenn Close:
Is Glenn Close the ultimate screen survivor, asks
‘My childhood gave me a kind of PTSD,’ the ultimate screen survivor says
Glenn Close has just been crucified, and it sounds like it went rather well. A few days before we meet, the actress recorded her big showstopping scene for a new musical in which her character, the protagonist’s Scottish mother, nails herself to a cross.
“It’s largely autobiographical,” Close laughs. “Once my hands are both up there, John’s character asks to be hugged, and I explain that I can’t, because I’ve crucified myself.”
Her only concern, at this point, is that her Glaswegian accent won’t stand up to scrutiny: “I didn’t really have time to perfect it,” she frowns.
The musical, by John Cameron Mitchell, director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch ,is called Anthem, and will be released next year as a serial podcast, the 71-year-old actress’s first such credit in a career that has spanned the stage and screens of all sizes. In the cinema, she has been the bunny-boiling Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction and the Dalmatian-skinning Cruella de Vil; on television, Patty Hewes in the legal drama Damages; on Broadway and in the West End, Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard.
Close was moving between mediums before it was cool, or even broadly possible: she recalls in 1982, after breaking into Hollywood via the oddball Robin Williams vehicle The World According to Garp, being offered the lead in a made-for-TV film called Something about Amelia — “and my agent said to me, ‘This will ruin your movie career’.”
When she began Damages, the actress Holly Hunter rang to ask how life was in the then-dawning age of prestige television. “And I told her it’s fabulous. And then she did one too.”
It is an overcast Thursday, with London veiled in drizzle for the British premiere of Close’s new film, The Wife: no auto-crucifixion here, but much self-mutilation and sacrilege of a subtler type. Adapted from Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel, it is a dark and devious character study in which Close plays Joan Castleman, the supportive spouse of the greymaned literary lion Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), who has been summoned to Stockholm to receive a long-anticipated Nobel Prize. Tagging along as his plus-one, Joan reflects with dismay, and then wrath, on a life spent in her husband’s shadow — and in their hotel room, grievances are aired, secrets exhumed.
Set in the Nineties, with flashbacks to Joan’s student days, it plays as a sly riposte to the so-called “Great Man theory” of history.
Close describes it as “part-period piece, partlove story, part-Bergmanesque drama — so much so the latter that it could have been called Scenes from a Marriage. I think it’s good that it’s hard to characterise. Kind of like life, right?”
Close’s performance in Fatal Attraction led to her fourth of six Oscar nominations to date. And as soon as The Wife screened at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, the talk began again: could this be the role that finally clinches it? With a politician’s tact, she says she is “thrilled” by the speculation, particularly as she sees the part as “one of the trickiest I’ve had to play. Because I had to come up with an answer to a big question: why hasn’t she left him? I was so sure that all the women in the audience would jump up and yell ‘Just leave him!’ So I had to answer that question for myself.”
Doing so involved some searching conversations with her 30-year-old daughter Annie Starke, who plays the