Glenn Close on Hollywood
Glenn Close has enjoyed a nearly 50-year career on stage and screen, delighting generations with nuanced performances ranging from a fading starlet to a Disney villain. Ahead of her latest film Hillbilly Elegy, she talks to Sophie Elmhirst about being an outsider in Hollywood and why her hunger for work remains strong in her seventies
the first surprise is her attire. Glenn Close is sitting in front of a window in her home on the north side of Bozeman, Montana, wearing an All Blacks rugby shirt. Next to her, on his own chair, is her white Havanese dog Pippy, who has developed such a following through his appearance at the Independent Spirit Awards and on Close’s Instagram that he is, she calculates, responsible for no fewer than six people she knows – including her friend Andrew Lloyd Webber – now having a Havanese of their own. Close looks deeply proud, as if nearly five decades of playing leading film and theatre roles could never match such an achievement. From afar, you’d think Close might be grande dame-ish. She has portrayed characters as diverse as Norma Desmond and Cruella de Vil, and has a subtly powerful presence on stage and screen. But in reality (or at least on Zoom), she is unassuming, self-questioning and utterly unconcerned with her physical appearance or outward display of any kind. Hence the rugby shirt. ‘I take after my mum,’ she tells me, laughing. ‘We were unadorned women.’
Once you know this about Close, her latest role makes sense. In Ron Howard’s adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by the writer JD Vance, she is transformed. She plays Vance’s grandmother, Mamaw, a woman with an enormous perm, a gift for profanity, a cigarette constantly hanging from her mouth and the general air of someone who has led the most unforgiving of lives. The story follows three generations of the writer’s family as Mamaw steps in to raise the young Vance after his mother succumbs to drug addiction.
For Close, who had a wealthy upbringing in Greenwich, Connecticut, the part was a leap. But as soon as she heard Howard was developing the movie, she wrote him a note, saying she hoped he’d consider her. ‘I just flung that out there, but I thought it would be a long shot,’ she says. ‘It’s not the kind of role people would necessarily think of me in.’ The cast spent time with Vance’s relatives, studying photographs and listening to stories. They wanted to be as true as possible to the original characters, and they must have got something right: when Mamaw’s son came on set as Close was filming a scene, he quickly had to leave again, unsettled by seeing his mother brought back to life.
In Mamaw – who had wanted to be a lawyer, but spent her life devoted to supporting her children – Close found another example of the kind of woman she had described in her celebrated 2019 Golden Globes speech. Tearfully accepting the award for her layered portrayal of Joan Castleman, the spouse of a Nobel Prizewinning author, in The Wife, she spoke about her own mother, ‘who really sublimated herself to my father her whole life’. Women, she noted, were often the nurturers who held their families together, but it was vital that we find our own ‘personal fulfilment’. Up there on stage at the Globes, receiving a standing ovation, Close seemed to exemplify that fulfilment. Over the course of three marriages and while raising a daughter, the actress Annie Starke, Close has consistently created extraordinary work and won numerous awards (though, to the industry’s amazement, never quite an Oscar). What’s more, at 73, she shows no sign of easing up.
When I ask Close how she has sustained such a hunger for work, she looks surprised at the idea that it could ever have waned. ‘It really is a fascinating time of life,’ she says, ‘because I don’t feel any older in my spirit, and yet I’m in this body, right? I wake up in the morning and look at my skin and I go, “I don’t believe this!”’ She glances down at her arm and laughs, as if amazed by the physical reality of her age. ‘That’s not really who I am, we’re not our bodies, we’re some other thing that looks out. And so whatever it is inside, this remains very young and very curious.’
Part of Close’s stamina in the industry comes, ironically, from her unwillingness to take part in many aspects of it. She has never lived in LA, nor spent time working whatever scene might have been advantageous to her. ‘I’ve always considered myself a bit of an outsider, actually,’ she says. ‘I’m an introvert, and it took me a long time to accept that.’ She had found herself in a profession that demanded not only artistic performance, but also an engagement in the wider circus – awards shows and press junkets, rounds of parties. For two decades, she says, she wore the same Armani suits to everything because they were comfortable and it meant she didn’t have to think about what to wear. She is conscious she hasn’t had the career of some of her grander peers, who might have movies lined up years in advance; instead, she has veered from job to job, often doing theatre or off beat films, with no plan at all. (‘Any actor who says they have a plan for their life? It’s apocryphal,’ she tells me). The one thing she regrets is that she didn’t start making films earlier: already a respected stage actress, she only took her first film role aged 32, in The World According to Garp, and so she feels she missed out on a decade of parts.
Still, Close will take the life she has had instead of the one she might have had. If it hadn’t been acting, she would have been working with animals, maybe conservation of some kind. ‘I was such a little wild child, I spent all my time running over the wonderful countryside of my grandfather’s farm in Connecticut; that had a huge effect on me.’ She and her siblings lived in imaginary worlds – Tina, her older sister, playing the sheriff while Close galloped beside her on her pretend horse. That’s how she learnt to act, she thinks. Now, in Montana, where she moved not long ago to be near her siblings, she finds a similar solace in a property she has out on the edge of the forest. It is there, among the elks and the mountain lions and the bears – no matter what is going on professionally or what chatter there is about whether she might ever win that Oscar (‘It does not weigh on my mind’) – that she can be most herself. ‘Even sitting on a ridge, I feel that I’m not sitting on the earth, I feel the earth is holding me up. I’m incredibly lucky to be able to do that,’ she says. ‘When I was a little girl running around the woods of Connecticut, it was the same thing… I’m still that kid, really.’ ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is out on Netflix now.
‘It really is a fascinating time of life because I don’t feel any older in my spirit, and yet I’m in this body’