IntervIew
of doing so, to discover love and forge family ties. The film is based on the short story, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, by Irish writer George Moore. Close is no stranger to the character, having performed the role on an off-Broadway stage in 1982 (for which she won a prestigious Obie award). It’s a safe bet to say that getting the movie made has been, if not something of an obsession for her, then certainly a cause. “I was just fascinated by the story,” she begins. “For me, the character of Albert Nobbs is intriguing and highly sympathetic – she has very interesting psychology in that she is more complex than even she herself thinks. I’m drawn, actually, to characters that dream against the odds and have no self-pity – that’s a compelling combination. Added to all of this is Albert’s naïveté, which was not necessarily of the era, but you have to note that Nobbs went underground due to a major trauma, and that trauma locks you up to a large degree. She seems fine just surviving. I found it very believable because in a world where she has no name, no family, no means of making money, she is surviving and doing pretty well.”
I contact John Banville. I have to admit that I had never heard of him at the time – he just wasn’t on my radar …” Banville, says Close, brought a great sense of language to the finished/revised screenplay. “It was such a long process that I can’t recall whether there are certain scenes that John had written that have stayed in the movie, but his huge, ongoing and wonderful collaboration was the language. Even when we were shooting the movie in Dublin in the winter of 2010, he’d be there virtually every day on call to
The waiting game – Glenn Close plays Albert Nobbs, a waiter in Victorian Dublin, in the Oscar-nominated film of the same name, alongside Brendan Gleeson, aka Dr Holloran, and a raft of Irish actors including Antonia CampbellHughes, Maria Doyle-Kennedy and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
“In the Oscar nominations you’re one of five up for it, so who can be a loser out of that? ... But I’m aware that the world likes to have winners and losers.” As well as co-producing the film, Close co-wrote it with the help of acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville. He was, Close admits, brought on board to localise (or, perhaps, colloquialise) the film. “I had a first version of the script completed by Gabriella Prekop, about twelve years ago, and after I read it I realised it had to be ‘Irishised’. So I called up the director, Stephen Frears, a good friend of mine, and asked him to recommend someone who would be great to work with. Stephen suggested that 42 |
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provide a word or a line to make it as authentic as possible.” The road to getting the film made began when Close branched out beyond her acting duties into production in the 1990s. She took out a first option on the story in 1998, and realised fairly quickly that it was going to be difficult to raise money for an independent film with such an unlikely theme. “It’s even harder now, of course, but for me to have walked into numerous offices in Hollywood, looking like I look, and tell them
that I’m going to be playing a waiter – in Dublin, in the early 1900s … Well, people get nervous. They can’t make that leap, and so I knew it was going to be a hard sell. That was something I never resented, by the way.” Hard sell rarely equals easy money, however, and so it was the wearying task of raising funds that took up most of the time. Close put up “significant money” of her own, she reveals. “I have two wonderful producers, one of whom is from Texas. We ended up getting our first significant tranche of money from a very, very successful guy there who works in real estate, and we convinced him to come on board. He had never, ever thought about investing in a movie, but I think now he’s very happy!” A member of a prominent New England family (her father was once personal physician to Zaire’s President Mobuto), Close had an apparently idyllic childhood growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut. She studied theatre at William and Mary College in Virginia, and then forged an acting career on (and off) Broadway from 1973 onwards until movie sets usurped the stages. During those early years of her professional life, did she have any sense of where she was going or what she wanted to do? “No, I just wanted to act,” she replies. “At that time in the 1970s, I