CLO ENCOUNT TER
GLENN CLOSE
Glenn Close is about to make history—at least a mini version of it. “This is the first time I’ve been in one place long enough to see the changing of the seasons for one full year,” says the actress of stage, movies and TV, who’s talking to Parade on Zoom f rom her new home base in Bozeman, Mont. She moved there last December to be near her three siblings, who play an integral role in Close’s new routines in this time of COVID-19.
Every morning, for instance, after Close, 73, feeds her 5-year-old Havanese pup, Pippi, she walks the dog across the yard to her sister Jessie’s home, typically wearing an oversize T-shirt and some old boxer shorts. “I take my cup that has a little bit of half-and-half and sweetener in it, and I fill up my coffee over at her house,” she says. “And we just chat and laugh at the dogs, and that ’s pretty much the beginning of my day.” Today Close’s T-shirt reads “Human-Kind/Be Both,” and she’s pulled on a pair of L.L. Bean camping pants as she settles in by a wall of books and a stuffed chair where Pippi sleeps on a pillow. “Nobody dresses up in Bozeman,” she says. “I don’t know what I’ll do with the wardrobe that I brought out here that ’s in storage.”
That wardrobe is a packed-away testimony to the acting career that kept Close moving so much over the past four decades, with roles on Broadway in Sunset Boulevard and The Real Thing; in movies including Fatal Attraction, The Big Chill, Dangerous Liaisons, Reversal of Fortune, 101 Dalmatians and The Wife; and five seasons on television’s critically acclaimed Damages. Now she’s forging ahead into new territory, playing sharptongued, Kentucky-bred grandmother Mamaw in the film version of author J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir Hillbilly
I DON’T DO IT TO GET AN AWARD. YOU HAVE TO FIND JOY IN WHAT YOU DO.
Elegy, which premiered on Netflix this month.
Close read the book—in which Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, reflects on his hometown, his family history, his Appalachian roots and the American dream— when it came out in 2016, and she was immediately drawn to the gruff, loyal matriarch of the story; it was so distant f rom any role she’d done before.
Oscar-winning director Ron Howard’s film toggles between eras: the present day, in which Vance (Gabriel Basso) travels back to Middletown, Ohio, to help his sister (Haley Bennett) and drug-addicted mother (Amy Adams); and Vance’s youth, in which Mamaw plays an integral role in raising him. Close is nearly unrecognizable when she first appears onscreen, with f rizzy graying hair, wearing baggy clothes and a pair of huge ’80s eyeglasses and dangling a cigarette in her hand. For the part, she donned a wig and padding, and makeup artistry changed the shape of her nose and enlarged her ears. After the first hair-and-makeup test, “I walked on the set, and nobody knew it was me,” says Close, delighted.
“Mamaw was totally different f rom anything I’ve ever played,” she says—a woman whose Appalachian roots were a far cry f rom Close’s own.
‘WEIRD UPBRINGING’
Close was born in Greenwich, Conn. Her mother, Bettine, was a socialite and philanthropist, and her father, William, was a doctor. When she was 7, her parents became involved with the Moral Re-Armament religious group—an organization that Close has referred to as “cult-like”—and her family relocated to Af rica and then Switzerland, where Close attended boarding school. “I had a weird upbringing,” she says. She met her first husband, a musician, in the group. “I think that was basically an arranged marriage, actually,” she says, but “that ’s a whole other stor y.” That first marriage ended in an early divorce and, at age 22, Close went off to Virginia’s William & Mary, where “I really kind of started being myself, coming alive.”
Close had her first jobs in Virginia, working at the information desk at Colonial Williamsburg and at a Ramada Inn as “the world’s worst cocktail waitress.” When the hotel opened a nightclub, she was hired as the maître d’, “which was a huge lesson in how nasty people can be,” she says. All of it was an education in life, alongside her studies in theater and anthropology. “I’m fascinated by evolution,” she explains of her anthro minor, “by why we are the way we are.” Close also found the subject matter useful when she discovered what she truly cared about: acting.
She was trained by theater professor Howard Scammon, who sensed the seriousness of her passion and became a mentor. Close wistfully remembers the day she was about to launch her professional career onstage in Love for Love at New York’s Helen Hayes Theatre. It was the fall after she graduated, and she was the understudy for each of the leads in three plays, with small parts in each one. Scammon showed up just to watch her “go in the stage door.”
Close’s career advanced quickly after that important “entrance.” Six years later, she received her first Tony nomination, for 1980’s Barnum on Broadway, and two years after that, an Academy Award nomination for The World According to Garp, her very first theatrical film role. But she says she was never good at auditioning. She recalls trying
on her new life in Montana, her three marriages and playing her edgiest role yet in Hillbilly Elegy