Glenn Close

Glenn Close (born March 19, 1947, Greenwich, Connecticut, U.S.) is an American actress who drew acclaim for her considerable range and versatility.

Close grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, a town her ancestors had helped to found. Her father was a well-known surgeon who left the mansions and well-manicured lawns of Greenwich to open a medical clinic in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) when Close was 13. She spent several years in Africa and at boarding schools in Switzerland before returning to Connecticut to live with her grandmother and attend Rosemary Hall, an exclusive girls’ school in Greenwich. Following her high-school graduation in 1965, Close spent several years touring Europe and the United States with a musical group called Up with People.

In 1970 Close enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. After graduating in 1974 with a degree in drama and a Phi Beta Kappa key, she joined the New Phoenix Repertory Company and made her Broadway debut that same year. A succession of other theatre roles followed, and Close’s reputation grew. In 1980 she received a Tony Award nomination for her role in Barnum, which drew the attention of motion-picture director George Roy Hill, who offered her a role in The World According to Garp (1982), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.

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Following her film debut in Garp, Close was nominated for Oscars as best supporting actress for roles in The Big Chill (1983) and The Natural (1984). In 1987 and 1989 she received best actress Academy Award nominations for her roles as a psychopathic temptress in the thriller Fatal Attraction and as the scheming Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons.

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In the 1990s Close starred in such films as Hamlet (1990); Reversal of Fortune (1990); The House of the Spirits (1993), based on the novel by Isabel Allende; and the journalism comedy The Paper (1994). In 1996 she took such varied roles as the first lady in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! and Cruella De Vil in a live-action remake of the Disney film 101 Dalmatians. The following year Close starred as the vice president, alongside Harrison Ford, in the thriller Air Force One (1997). Close’s subsequent film roles included the ringleader of a group of ideal suburban wives in The Stepford Wives (2004) and the mother of a nervous bride in Evening (2007). In Albert Nobbs (2011), which she cowrote, Close starred as a woman who disguises herself as a man in order to find work in 19th-century Ireland; for her performance, she received a sixth Oscar nomination. She later played the leader of an intergalactic police force in the sci-fi adventure Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Her film credits from 2017 included Crooked House, an adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery; the comedy Father Figures; and The Wife, for which she earned rave reviews—as well as an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award—playing the supportive but reserved spouse of an acclaimed author. In 2020 Close starred in Hillbilly Elegy, an adaptation of the best-selling memoir by J.D. Vance, whose family was from Appalachia. For her performance, she received another Academy Award nomination. She then was cast as a doctor in the sci-fi drama Swan Song, in which a dying man (Mahershala Ali), who has kept his condition a secret from his loved ones, contemplates cloning himself.

Although best known for her work on-screen, Close had a distinguished career as a stage actress. She received Tony Awards in 1984 and 1992 for her work in The Real Thing and Death and the Maiden, respectively. In 1995 she impressed Broadway audiences as the delusional former film star Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatrical production of Sunset Boulevard, for which she won another Tony Award, this one for best actress in a musical. Her performance as an imposing matriarch in a Broadway revival (2014–15) of Edward Albee’s existential drama A Delicate Balance was lauded for its precision. Close earned additional acclaim for reprising the role of Desmond in a Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard in 2017.

One of the few performers to be nominated for the top awards in film, theatre, and television, Close also earned Emmy Awards for her roles in the television movie Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995) and the dramatic series Damages (2007–12), in which she played a high-powered attorney with Machiavellian proclivities. For her work in the latter production, Close won a Golden Globe Award in 2008. Three years earlier she had won the award for her performance as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (2003), a television remake of the 1968 film.

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