The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘My childhood gave me a kind of PTSD’
She was brought up in a cult and has been pipped to six Oscars. Is Glenn Close the ultimate screen survivor?
Sunset Boulevard. 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 grey-maned 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, part-love 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 talks calmly and precisely, shooting bolts of eye contact to make phrases like that last one stick. I’m struck as we talk that you couldn’t design a more ruthlessly effective face for cinema: while making a point about the importance of close-ups (“they’re where the emotional connections are… the reason you go out thinking, ‘I’ve felt something’”), she fixes me with a look that makes me feel like I’m out on a ledge.
Cinemagoers experienced the same en masse in Fatal Attraction, the 1987 erotic thriller that cemented her star status. The film is a product of its time, but holds up amazingly well – not least because Close’s terrific lead turn as the obsessive but vulnerable mistress of Michael Douglas’s philandering lawyer taps into something more ageless than the perms and leather wrap coats.
“I always felt that Fatal Attraction came out at a time where there was all this resentment brewing between the sexes because of feminism,” she says. “And that movie poked a hole in the blister, and it just erupted.” She still can’t abide the slashermovie finale that sees the scarlet woman vanquished by the loyal wife: the original, more haunting ending was replaced when test audiences bayed for a showdown.
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 young Joan in flashback. “She had to establish who Joan is: my job was to follow her,” Close says. “She’s a millennial, as they say, and they were all born after feminism. I thought the character would be hard for her generation to understand. But she got it, she did her homework.” In preparing, the two talked about Close’s own mother, the New England socialite Bettine Moore, who died aged 90 in 2015, “and totally deferred to my father our whole lives. She was a woman of great potential who, at the end of her life, tragically said, ‘I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing’.”
Close’s father, William, served for 16 years as the personal physician of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictatorial president of Zaire. “My dad was brilliant, but it was all about him,” says Close. She and her siblings advised their mother to file for divorce. “But she said, ‘No, I made a vow’ – they got married in 1944, you know, so it was a different world. But it was painful to watch. So I’d seen this story in my own family. My father
‘I’d seen this story in my own family. My father liked people to worship him’