TRIBUTE TO GLENN CLOSE
Glenn Close A Woman to Contend With B Y ZOË E LTON
Glenn Close is in Toronto. It’s film festival season, and after a successful launch at Telluride of her new film, Albert Nobbs, Close is now in the hustle and bustle of this city’s industry-driven festival. It’s amid this whirlwind that I get my 15-minute phone call as she navigates a day packed with interviews about her singularly remarkable performance as Nobbs, a mid– 19th-century woman who lives as a man in order to survive.
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Reprising her Obie-winning off-Broadway performance, and translating the play to the screen, has been a passionproject for Close for almost three decades. Pretty much her whole working life separates the two performances, giving pause to ponder the trajectory of this extraordinary career. It’s one that spans multiple genres—dramas, thrillers, musicals, period pieces and costume dramas, groundbreaking television and sometimes the outright wacky—and I can’t help but wonder where so many great performances come from. And there are many: from Jenny Fields in The World According to Garp to Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction; from the Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons to First Lady Marsha Dale in Mars Attacks!; from Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians to Patty Hewes in Damages. But how do you get from any of these to a mid–19th-century woman who has spent her life dressing as a man out of sheer necessity? How do you get under the skin of an Albert Nobbs? Close spoke about the choices an actor may or may not have in taking on a role. She notes that choice is tough for an actor—“It’s rare for an actor to say, ‘I want to be doing this in 5 years’”— and I asked if she consciously sought out variety. She responds, “I remember when I had done Fatal Attraction, and then . . . I was offered Dangerous Liaisons, and people said, ‘Oh, you’re going to be typecast as a certain kind
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of woman.’ I guess in some way I’ve done a lot of characters like that, but I do them because I find them interesting. There’s something about them I find challenging. So I guess no, I really don’t think that just because I’ve played an upsetting woman that I won’t play another upsetting woman.” She corrects herself, with a laugh: “Maybe ‘woman to contend with,’ not necessarily ‘upsetting.’” With Fatal Attraction, Close has said that she spoke to psychiatrists to see if the psychological trajectory of Alex Forrest was feasible. I asked what she learnt from them that supported the work or supported her, and whether their observations helped give her an empathetic understanding of this woman. “Absolutely,” she replied. “The process that I go through for any character is: I keep asking why—Why? Why? Why?” She continues: “I would say to these psychiatrists, why would you do that, why would she boil a bunny?” she recalls with a note of ironic humor in her voice. “Why would she throw up in the bushes, why would she do that? In the answer [to] what would cause that kind of behavior, [the key is] to construct a story for these characters. It usually leads you to finding a common humanity with them. I really feel very strongly
that no matter how badly anybody that you’re playing behaves, you have to find the point where they’re human, maybe fragile, and you can love them in some way. Because if you judge them, you’re separating yourself from them and not doing them justice.” She remembers another instance when she consulted a psychiatrist while building a character. It was Blanche DuBois, whom she played at the National Theatre in London. Close “had this theory that [Blanche] was actually suffering from acute PTSD because she’d actually seen her young husband shoot himself in front of her. And that’s traumatic, an emotional trauma, and if that’s left unattended to, it leads to all the kinds of behaviors that she’s acting out. So it’s just an interesting way for me to understand her behavior. It’s all the symptoms: She’s reliving it, hearing the music—that’s all very PTSD.” That Close’s observation was held up by a psychiatric interpretation perhaps
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9/22/11 5:25:46 AM