Glenn Close: 'At 73 I feel I'm just beginning'

Glenn Close is brandishing a carving knife. It’s a good 12 inches long, the smooth silver blade glinting beneath her sitting-room lights, and I’m not going to lie: this is scary stuff. But then the 73-year old actor bursts out laughing, and I’m reminded that this isn’t an interview gone horribly wrong – too many questions about her private life? – but Close showing off one of the most infamous movie props of the 20th century: the knife used to slash Michael Douglas in the 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction.

With her birch-silver shoulder-length hair, high aristocratic forehead and fine cashmere jumper, Close is refined and softly spoken, and prone to long, thoughtful pauses. Before being cast as cold and villainous women, she enjoyed a spate of nurturing roles (in George Roy Hill’s 1982 film The World According to Garp she played a single mum, and the following year she was earth mother Sarah Cooper in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill). In person she’s more motherly than haughty, with a natural warmth and an easy laugh. Alongside her ageless features, these give the impression of a woman 20 years younger. ‘Can you believe it’s made of cardboard?’ she asks, putting the knife down. Not really. Even on Zoom, with the actor 5,000 miles away in Montana, that carving knife looks as terrifying as it did in the penultimate scene of Fatal Attraction, when her character Alex Forrest was wielding it at her ex-lover Dan as he lay bloodied in his bathtub. But Close is gazing at it fondly. ‘It’s a beauty isn’t it? I usually keep it in a frame on the wall in my office.’

That should focus any director’s mind. Then again, Close doesn’t need a 12in blade for that: her 46-year career spanning stage and screens, big and small, does it for her. Indeed it’s baffling to think that, despite her chilling renditions of bunny-boiling Alex, puppy-skinning Cruella de Vil in Stephen Herek’s 101 Dalmatians (1996) and the calculating Marquise de Merteuil in Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988), and despite her poignant portrayals of an eclipsed spouse in Björn L Runge’s 2017 drama The Wife and a 19th-century Dublin woman passing herself off as a male butler in Rodrigo García’s Albert Nobbs (2011), Close has never won an Oscar.

Her forthcoming film, Hillbilly Elegy, might change that. Directed by Ron Howard and based on venture capitalist JD Vance’s 2016 bestseller about his working-class upbringing in Ohio and Kentucky, and the legacy of abuse, addiction, poverty and violence that he was able to escape, the drama is expected to be one of the biggest contenders at the 2021 Academy Awards. Close (who plays Vance’s grandmother, Mamaw), Amy Adams (who plays his heroin-addicted mother, Bev) and Gabriel Basso (who plays Vance) have all been tipped for nominations.

Close is unrecognisable as lumpen, frizzyhaired old Mamaw, Hillbilly Elegy’s larger than-life matriarch. But her character has the best lines – ‘Oh I don’t give a rat fart what you’re smoking kid, but if you think you’re hiding it, honey, you’re dumb as a bag of hair’ – and the actor wishes she were more like Mamaw in that respect. ‘Her sense of humour was wonderful, even if she did have a mouth like a truck driver,’ she tells me, sipping on a cup of tea as her pet Havanese, Pip, snores beneath the table. ‘Sir Pippin of Beanfield’ accompanies Close everywhere and has built up a 13,000-strong following on Instagram, where he has been documenting his red-carpet forays and international travel since 2015.

Although the rawness of Mamaw’s wit has led to the character being described by one UK reviewer as a cross between Jeremy Kyle and Mrs Doubtfire, she is inarguably the heroine of both the film and Vance’s story, saving her grandson as she does from the family fate. And that idea of the matriarch holding the family together is universal.

‘I think that’s a cultural phenomenon across the world. Both my grandmothers were major figures in my family,’ says Close, whose parents spent a great deal of time abroad, having joined a religious group called Moral Re-Armament when she was seven. ‘They were both very different but important figures, especially my paternal grandmother,’ she says of the woman who had a hand in raising her. ‘She was tough, but we sure learned from her.’

It was because Mamaw wouldn’t let Vance succumb to a ‘woe is me’ mentality and forced him instead to work that the author made it all the way to Yale and beyond. His grandmother was the oomph behind his American dream. But for the Connecticut-born daughter of a surgeon, who spent her early life on a country estate, getting inside the body and mind of a smoking, swearing and hobbling ‘hillbilly’ must surely have been one of her biggest challenges to date.

‘That’s why I was so gratified when Ron asked me to play her,’ she says, explaining that the cast spent three weeks with Vance’s family prior to filming. ‘Because who would have thought of me in that part? And totally new territory is what every actress hopes for.’

There are few who are able to reinvent themselves as completely as Close does with every role. Like all the greats, she has a complete absence of vanity, and donned fat padding along with a prosthetic nose and ears, she tells me, ‘in order not to be distracted by my own face’. But although those things were invaluable in turning Close into Mamaw, the most transformative force was empathy, she says. ‘To me it’s one of the great aspects of my craft – because it’s about the exploration of the human condition: simply what is a person feeling at this specific moment in time? What has influenced their behaviour? You cannot judge a character if you’re going to do them justice.’

In the eight months Close has been locked down in her red-brick Montana home, she has had a lot of time to think – about ‘why we do the things we do’, about ‘empathy and forgiveness’, and about ageing and mortality. The thrice-married actor lives there alone, having divorced her biotech-entrepreneur husband David Shaw five years ago. But her sister Jessie lives across the yard, her brother Sandy and sister Tina are nearby, and Close seems as serene as anyone can be given the circumstances.

It’s often said that women are more content from their 50s onwards, ‘and that has certainly been the case for me’, Close says with aplomb. ‘It’s ironic, right? Here I am at 73 and I feel like I’m just beginning. I mean my skin is a size too big now. That’s one of the great ironies of getting older.’ She laughs, poking at her arm. ‘We’re trapped in these things we have no power over, so we just have to watch these changes happen. But I feel more alive, more myself, than I ever have in my life… and here we are locked down!’

Since the pandemic brought her industry to a screeching halt, Close has watched spring and summer go by, baked banana bread, read Toni Morrison and John Banville, despaired at her President along with the ‘rawness and violence’ of her country, posted moving tributes to New York on Instagram – ‘the city that nurtured me from the very beginning of my career’ – and hiked. Today, through her window, she shows me a Montana landscape white with snow. ‘I’m always moved by the changes in seasons, that we have the possibility of rest and then rebirth. It’s a reminder that whatever we do, life goes on.’

Although she says that she feels safe where she is, and her 32-year-old daughter Annie – from a former relationship with John Starke, who was the production manager on The World According to Garp – is coming to spend Christmas with her, it’s clear that like all of us, Close is missing human connection most. ‘After all, staying connected to each other is what keeps us sane,’ says the actor, who has been active in destigmatising mental-health problems, and co-founded the charity Bring Change to Mind after Jessie was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder. ‘We’re a species that has to have connection, and I think the deeper and more lasting a connection you can forge, the better off you are. We die without connection.’

Being able to Zoom her best friend, [actor] Mary Beth Hurt, and five high-school friends every week ‘has meant the world to me’, she says. ‘And I also find that, although I don’t exercise enough, being out in nature works wonders.’ But for a while earlier this year Close admits that she was ‘at sixes and sevens’.

‘I remember Christopher Walken once telling me that when he wasn’t working he was like a fighter sitting in the corner, and I have felt that. Because usually I’ll come here to reboot after a job, but this is the longest I’ve been home for the whole of my adult life, and suddenly there’s no job to prepare for.’

Watching some of her old films has brought solace. And when Close and Jessie watched Dangerous Liaisons the other night, ‘I found that it still holds up!’ she marvels. ‘It really was such a good script. But I remember finding out that when the book was first published, people felt Madame de Merteuil hadn’t been punished enough, so [its author] Laclos gave her smallpox; he made “her soul show up on her face”.’

In fiction as in life, female characters have always been judged more harshly than men, Close believes. ‘I think a strong woman is still considered aberrant,’ she explains when I ask her why this might be.

Close was similarly dismayed by the ending chosen for Fatal Attraction after the original one – in which Alex Forrest died by suicide – failed to meet with test audiences’ approval. ‘That wasn’t cathartic enough for people.’ So instead, after Alex attacks them both with the carving knife, Dan’s loyal wife blasts her away with the family gun. ‘And that made him more of a victim, which drove me nuts! It would be so great to remake Fatal Attraction now and retell the story from Alex’s point of view. If you did that, she would be a tragic figure instead of one of the great villains of the 20th century. Because I was playing somebody who was out of control, and in desperate need of help. And there were reasons in her background [the film hints at childhood trauma] as to why that was.

The memoir her editor is urging her to finish has forced Close to examine how trigger points in childhood can continue to affect a person throughout their life. Close and her siblings – Jessie, Sandy, Tambu Kisoki  (whom her parents adopted while working in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Tina – had a far from conventional upbringing. From the age of seven to 22, Close remained a member of Moral ReArmament, the non-denominational movement founded by an American evangelical and extolling ‘the four absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love’. But MRA’s influence, Close has said, was cult-like. For years her father, William, moved the family around, from the MRA headquarters in Caux, Switzerland, to Africa, where he started a clinic in 1960 and stayed for 16 years, initially working as a surgeon in the hospital in Kinshasa before eventually becoming the personal physician of Zaire's long-time dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, founding a maternity hospital and playing an important role in controlling the first Ebola epidemic.      

Mental-health issues were neither understood nor acknowledged in the way that they are now, and the warning signs of Jessie’s bipolar disorder were overlooked. Only at the age of 50, after three suicide attempts, was she finally diagnosed. ‘Nobody in our family had a clue,’ Close told me when I interviewed her about her mental-health advocacy in 2013. ‘I feel a real sense of shame that I didn’t pay more attention at the time.’

Jessie wasn’t the only one who had been struggling, however, and by the time Close left to study theatre and anthropology at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, she has said she felt ‘spiritually bereft’. Eclipsed by her husband, Close’s mother, Bettine, was only able to articulate her feelings towards the end of her life. She told her daughter: ‘I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything.’

Close was able to draw on that sentiment for The Wife, in which she played Joan Castleman, the sublimated spouse of a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, played by Jonathan Pryce (with her daughter Annie co-starring as a younger Joan). But there are parallels too with Mamaw and her daughter, Bev, in Hillbilly Elegy. Both have the same thwarted intelligence as the actor’s own mother, who was 18 when she married Close’s father. ‘Women of that age didn’t have as many possibilities as we have now,’ Close tells me.

Of course, many in the declining social and regional sector of American society on which JD Vance shone a light with his memoir still feel their opportunities are limited. ‘But in the end, Vance was saved by Mamaw. Even though she’d made huge mistakes herself, she wanted him to break out of that cycle.’ Close pauses, and when she speaks I get the feeling we’re no longer just talking about her character. ‘I’ve always thought that the burden of forgiveness is on the child. Because parents will always make mistakes, and some will make more disastrous mistakes than others' she says, adding: 'I believe forgiveness is the hardest thing for humans to embrace. It is truly revolutionary.'

A shrink might draw neat links between the marital relationship Close saw modelled as a child and her own peripatetic love life. At 21 she married Cabot Wade, the guitarist of the MRA-supporting music group in which she performed, but the union floundered after two years, along with her involvement with the movement. Then, after several years of theatre in New York and her big-screen break, at 35, in The World According to Garp, there was a brief period during which she decided to play society wife to her second husband, a venture capitalist named James Marlas, before she and John Starke got together and had their daughter. But the relationship with Starke didn’t last and in 2006 she married Shaw, whom she divorced in 2015.

Close has previously admitted to having been ‘in moments in relationships when I was made to feel invisible’, and as we’re discussing one of her only regrets – ‘I always wish I’d started acting earlier’ – and she cites Elizabeth I as one of the parts she is now too old to play, I pick up on a casual comment she makes about how the Virgin Queen ‘dangled marriage but never did it, because she knew that it would be giving away her power’. Does Close think that’s true? She ponders this: ‘Yes, I think it can be. But if you find the right enlightened person, you can have a great partnership. I personally have never found it – sadly. But I know people who have.’

Close doesn’t want to talk about her love life now, and cackles with horror at the idea of online dating: ‘Oh my God, no! Never in a million years! And I’m not looking for somebody. I’m fine as I am.’ But she would like to see older women in romantic roles on screen. ‘It would be nice to have more scenes for women my age because you don’t lose your sexuality – at all.’ Whether she would be prepared to star in them is another matter. ‘I know I've never done one of those love scenes where you’re completely naked. I’m not a huge fan of some of those kinds of love scenes. They always make me feel…’ she shudders. ‘Certainly when Jonathan and I did the sex scene in The Wife we didn’t have to do anything like that. Actually it was the first scene we shot,’ she remembers with a smile. ‘We arrived at the set in our pyjamas and both just looked at each other and said: “OK – let’s do it!”’

Beneath the table, Pip is getting restless, and when I ask what the rest of the day holds for them both, Close confesses, ‘I still feel guilty about spending time on myself, and like I should always be knocking things off my to-do list. But a friend once gave me the best advice:  You need to keep your cup full and deal with the world with the overflow.  It’s so true. Don’t empty yourself. Spend time on yourself: it’s OK to do that.’

As soon as the pandemic allows, Close will start work on Rob Ashford’s film version of Sunset Boulevard, in which she will reprise her Tony-winning 1994 stage role as Norma Desmond. ‘So we’re just waiting for the green light on that,’ she says wistfully.

As for that elusive Oscar: ‘Well it would be nice,’ Close concedes. ‘But then again I think I have the most nominations without a win… so it might be sad to break that record.’ Even sadder, surely, if she did win but – with the Academy Awards expected to be virtual – was unable to collect it in person? ‘Because of course that would be what life does, right?’ She throws her hands up. ‘Forty-six years at it, and when finally that moment happens, you’re Zoomed in from your house.’ I think she could still make it count, if… But Close pips me to the post: ‘If I have that knife hanging right there behind me? Oh yeah. You bet.’

Hillbilly Elegy is on Netflix from 24 November