CELEBRITIES
With a gallery of iconic roles behind her, screen legend says she is, at 70, in greater demand than ever
Even at the ripe old age of 70, screen legend Glenn Close is in greater demand than ever from filmmakers.
As a girl growing up on her grandfather’s estate in rural Connecticut, Glenn Close turned the field outside her house into a stage. That some day she would be an actress was clear to her as long ago as she can remember. “I would roam the countryside, pretending all day long, because those images up on the big screen caught my imagination,” she recalled. “I never questioned it. The only thing was, I didn’t want to be my sister’s sidekick any more. I wanted to have the lead role.”
Consider it done. At 70, Close has earned six Oscar nominations — three as best actress and three as best supporting actress — not to mention three Emmys and three Tonys. Not that she’s done, of course.
“I still feel like I’m 18 and just starting,” she said during an interview in Toronto, looking great in a grey suit and stunning white hair.
Her recent work includes the films The Wife (2017) and The Wilde Wedding (2017), with Jonathan Pryce and John Malkovich respectively.
She also stars in the new Amazon series Sea Oak and the Netflix sci-fi drama What Happened to Monday.
Now, she’s back on the big screen in the comedy Father Figures, in which she plays Helen, a woman who finally comes clean with her sons (Ed Helms and Owen Wilson) about her colourful past.
“She hasn’t exactly been honest with them over the decades when it comes to who is their real father,” Close said, “which leads to complications.”
The candidate fathers include men played by Terry Bradshaw, Ving Rhames, JK Simmons and Christopher Walken.
Close is front and centre in the film, which lately is a novelty to an actress who, Oscar nominations not withstanding, is now in her eighth decade.
“It’s still difficult with film when you’re a woman,” she said. “On TV, it’s changed. As far as big studio movies, I’d love to be proven wrong. I do have a good choice of roles, because I do a lot of indie movies, so doing a big studio film was great. It was an incredible cast.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it, that there are not more roles for women my age? We’re at the peak of our power,” she said.
Even role models have role models, and Close’s is Dame Judi Dench.
“She has been my lead my entire career,” she said. “When I did my first movie, and then they wanted me to do a TV movie, I was told that it would ruin my career in film. I said, ‘What about Judi Dench, who has done everything her entire career?’ “I always wanted to explore great material.” Another role model is the legendary Katharine Hepburn. Close had already set her feet on the path to acting by the time she fell under Hepburn’s spell.
“My life took little twists and turns,” she said. “I didn’t end up as a freshman in college until age 22. As soon as I arrived on the campus of William and Mary, I walked straight into the theatre department and auditioned for Twelfth Night and got the role of Olivia.”
Then, one night when she was painting scenery for a show, there was a small, black-and-white television playing. Dick Cavett was interviewing Hepburn.
“She just mesmerised me,” Close recalled. “We both came from Connecticut and our fathers were doctors. I admired
that she seemed to know who she was and cut her own path through Hollywood. I listened to Katharine Hepburn say: ‘No regrets.’
“And, when it was over, I said, ‘OK, you want to do this, then do it’.”
She spent 10 years doing theatre before making her bigscreen debut as earth mother Jenny Fields in The World
According to Garp (1982), co-starring with Robin Williams. “Jenny was a New Englander,” the actress said, “so I basically decided to be my grandmother, who had a straight back and a wonderful way of talking.
“My first scene was holding a grocery bag,” she continued. “Beloved Robin was so wonderful. I didn’t know that on a film you had a little mic and didn’t have to shout your lines.”
That film earned her first Oscar nomination. The second came the following year, in the classic ensemble drama The
Big Chill (1983).
“The entire cast rehearsed for a month at Columbia Pictures, which is unheard of now,” Close recalled. “We also played this game, since most of us hadn’t done many films. We’d go out and see someone on the lot and we’d say, ‘Oh, my God, there’s Charles Bronson! He’s looking at us!’
“It was just a guy who looked like Charles Bronson.” One of her favourite roles was as the conniving Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons (1988).
“I think the key to her was that she was a brilliant woman who was brought up in a convent and, when she got out, was
expected to be married off and become some man’s property,” Close explained.
“She was to be at the whim of males. But she was so astute and smart that she observed how things worked. She made it her goal in life to never be used. In some ways she was a woman acting like a man in a man’s world.
“She gets punished for it. I seem to play a lot of women who have to be doubly punished.”
One of those women was Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987), which remains Close’s most remembered role.
She wasn’t the first choice on a casting list that originally included everyone from Kirstie Alley to Barbara Hershey to Michelle Pfeiffer. Now, though, it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Glenn Close boiling that bunny.
“A lot of men still come up and say, ‘You scared the crap out of me,’” she admitted, laughing. “And it was 30 years ago that we made the film.”
Close still doesn’t see Alex as evil. “She was tragic and not evil,” the actress insisted. “I wanted to make her as human as possible and try to understand her behaviour, even if the audience didn’t understand it.
“Fatal Attraction was the movie I did the most research on. I was fascinated by every aspect of Alex’s world, including the infamous boiling bunny scene. Was the bunny-boiling possible? Then I gave the script to two different psychiatrists and asked, ‘What creates this type of behaviour?’
“There are so many little things that I hinted at in the movie.” She wasn’t Oscar-nominated for her performance as Sunny von Bulow in the based-on-fact Reversal of Fortune (1990), but it’s one of her favourite roles.
“I loved the scene when she was eating ice cream, smoking a cigarette with dark glasses on,” Close said. “Basically, because she was diabetic, she was killing herself in front of everybody. It was really powerful.”
Another career highlight was the FX series Damages (2007
2012), in which she played a high-stakes litigator.
“I believe in going where there is great writing,” Close said. “I had Ann Roth, a dear friend and the wonderful costume designer, read it when I got the pilot. She said, ‘You would be crazy if you didn’t play that part.’
“It was a rare part,” the actress said, “and I searched for a way to get into my character’s head. She had this genius for keeping people off balance. It was thrilling.”
These days most of her best opportunities come on television.
“I love TV because it goes very fast,” Close said. “And I think, in many ways, TV offers you more than movies. It’s hard to tell a story without truncating it into two hours. The luxury of TV is that you can tell a story deeply and correctly. There’s less compromise that way.”
Close’s latest project is Sea Oak, a streaming series which debuted last month on Amazon, scripted by short-story writer George Saunders. She plays Aunt Bernie, a working-class woman in a Rust Belt city who dies in a home invasion, but comes back from the beyond full of rage and determined to get the life she deserved.
“George is one of our great short-story writers,” Close said. “I loved this piece because it was so out there. I never played a character like this before, so I said, ‘I’m in’.”
By now Close has played a long gallery of characters, but there are two that have stuck with her: one from Broadway, where she earned a Tony Award for her performance as faded film star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (2002) — she returned to Broadway and the role for a limited run in 2017, and a film version is still in the talking stages — and the other from the big screen.
“Only two characters have haunted me afterward,” she said. “One is Norma Desmond, when I first did it onstage, and the second is Alex Forrest from Fatal Attraction. Those women stay in my mind.”