From bunny boiler to hillbilly matriarch – the many faces of Glenn Close

It’s easy to view Glenn Close as Hollywood’s favourite female monster, writes Geoffrey Macnab. But as her latest role in ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ shows, her performances are always layered and nuanced

Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (Rex Features)

She boiled a bunny in Fatal Attraction. She terrified kids as Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians and put the fear of god into her adult adversaries in courtroom drama Damages. She was, the critics all agreed, an “imperious” Norma Desmond in the stage musical version of Sunset Boulevard, a role she is expected to play again on screen. This month, she can be seen as a frizzy-haired, redneck harridan in Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy.

On the basis of these roles, it’s easy to view Glenn Close as Hollywood’s favourite female monster. She is the go-to star for misogynistic casting directors when they want someone to portray the boss from hell, the crazy ex-girlfriend or the neurotic, high maintenance Hollywood has-been. Close can certainly convey jealousy and vengefulness with a demented fury that few of her contemporaries can match. She will probably be first choice as Clytemnestra – the Greek queen who murdered her husband in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter – if the US studios ever get round to filming The Oresteia.

“I think a strong woman is still considered aberrant,” Close told The Daily Telegraph recently, musing on why her characters are judged so harshly and often to come to very bad ends.

However, Close hasn’t lasted at the top of the industry for 40 years simply by portraying cartoonish villains and by channelling her inner rage on screen. She has a far greater range than her most famous roles might suggest. Her performances are always layered and nuanced, even when rabbit stew is the dish of the day.

Hillbilly Elegy isn’t a subtle film. Its portrayal of its Appalachian characters is patronising. They’re shown as hard-drinking, violent and self-destructive. “Mamaw” Vance (Close) is first seen at a barbecue hissing in a southern croak at her grandson, who has just been in a fight, “You tell them d***head bastards that three of them ain’t worth one Vance.” She wears enormous spectacles and t-shirts that stretch down to her knees. She looks throughout as if she is spoiling for a fight. Close, though, brings dignity and pathos to a figure who, early on, seems caricatured in the extreme. We learn how much she has suffered and how hard she has fought for her family.

As Mamaw Vance, Close is performing the same trick she has throughout her career, namely giving a sketchily-drawn character substance and sympathy. It’s instructive to read reviews of one of her first major film roles, as Robin Williams’ mother in The World According to Garp (1982). “Close performs miracles with the toughest of the story's many difficult roles. Garp's mother, an entertaining but largely unbelievable caricature in the novel, becomes a full-blooded woman here without losing one bit of her crazy conviction,” wrote The New York Times.

The same applies to her role as Alex Forrest in Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987), one of the most notorious films of the Eighties. In pop culture, Alex is seen as the demented former lover who stalked and terrorised the married man (Michael Douglas) with whom she had a very brief fling. That wasn’t how Close approached the role. When she was cast, Close consulted psychiatrists to ask if Alex’s vengeful behaviour was plausible. They suggested Alex was a victim of childhood sexual abuse but didn’t acknowledge that she had a mental disorder.

Close had a more sympathetic understanding of mental illness than the experts she met. “When I played her, what we came up with is someone who had been incested at a pre-memory [age], enough to have it really, really, really destroy her. People have said the character had an extreme version of a borderline personality. And I have to put ‘extreme’ there, of course, because it’s not at all reflective of every borderline personality,” she said in a 2017 interview.

Close played Alex with a blazing intensity, which is why the film resonated so strongly with audiences. She was opposite Michael Douglas, soon to play the master of the universe financier Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and yet Douglas seemed terrified and cowed in her presence.

Close has distanced herself from her own performance in Fatal Attraction in recent times, saying she’d approach the script very differently today. Rather than playing Alex as a raging psychopath, she would have acknowledged the character’s psychological vulnerability. She might also have questioned the film’s very questionable and conservative sexual politics, in particular the way Alex, the single career woman, is demonised while Douglas and Anne Archer, the married couple, are portrayed in a sympathetic light. Nonetheless, the fact Close went to such lengths to research the role underlines how seriously she took her work even then.

A nice piece of movie trivia is that Close still keeps the knife used in the movie’s tumultuous final scenes in her own kitchen. “It’s beautiful, made of wood and paper. It’s a work of art. And it’s nice for our guests to see it. It lets them know they can’t stay forever,” she said in one interview of a prop almost as famous as the one used in the shower scene in Psycho.  

Ironically, before Fatal Attraction, Close had been considered too anodyne for such an extreme role. “She always used to play nice people, stay-at-home people, so it was a new way of looking at her,” the film’s director Lyne noted in a recent interview with Decider.com. Lyne had originally wanted Debra Winger for the role. He little realised the raw voltage that Close would bring to the movie.

The success of Fatal Attraction changed perceptions of Close. She followed up the film with her sleekly malevolent Marquise de Merteuil, plotting revenge and romantic mischief in Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988). After two such movies, audiences would find it very hard to ever accept her again as a “nice” stay-at-home person. When you see her name in the credits, you expect a film or TV drama to have an edge.

Close can always give big, tour de force style performances when required. She was magnificent as law firm boss Patty Hewes in Damages (2007-2012) – ruthless, driven, high-handed and frequently obnoxious but still the character you always rooted for. Like the young lawyer Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) who is shocked by Patty but keeps on working for her, audiences had an appalled fascination with her. The series lasted for 59 episodes. Viewers wouldn’t have kept on coming back for more if Patty had simply been abusive. As always, even when playing seemingly the least likeable character, Close was able to hint at Patty’s yearnings and doubts – to suggest that she wasn’t born a bully but that her character was formed by her experiences working in a deeply chauvinistic world. The “damages” in the series were always as much personal as legal.

These days, Close very rarely gets the “stay-at-home” parts that she used to play before Fatal Attraction transformed her career. You don’t see her making salad or dancing around the kitchen as she did in The Big Chill (1983). When she does take on less forceful roles, audiences are likely to be suspicious. It was hard to credit her as the meek spouse, Joan Castleman, deferring to her conceited Nobel Prize-winning novelist husband Joseph (Jonathan Pryce) in 2017 drama, The Wife. She may have been nominated for an Oscar but this was one of her least convincing vehicles. You couldn’t help but feel disbelief when you saw Joan picking up Joseph’s dirty underwear. Joan suppresses her rage and resentment, concealing her own gifts as a writer, but everyone in the audience knew that Close could eat Pryce for breakfast in a moment if she wanted. It was frustrating to watch her at half throttle.

One of her best performances over the last decade was in Albert Nobbs (2011), as the impoverished woman in 19th-century Dublin who passes herself off as a man in order to work as a butler in a hotel. There was something Chaplinesque about the way she approached the role. In order to survive, Albert tries not to stick out, to be as ordinary and humble as possible.

“We love characters who have no self-pity and become believers in a dream,” Close once said, explaining what attracted her to Albert Nobbs, a role she also played on stage. That “no self-pity” line could be a motto for her career. Whereas other actors always want to ingratiate themselves, Close is ready to venture onto the dark side. There is never any special pleading or narcissism in her work. She won’t beg to be liked. She may often play nasty but she has strength and integrity. That is why audiences warm to her, regardless of how badly her characters behave.

Hillbilly Elegy will be streaming on Netflix from 24 November