Glenn Close reflects on being a single mother as a full-time actor: ‘If you’re a working parent, you always feel torn’

‘All kids want is to have their parents there’

(Getty Images)

Glenn Close is a legendary actress whose career in film and television spans more than four decades. But above all else, she is also a mother.

In an interview with Glamour published on 6 May, the award-winning actress reflected on the difficulties of working full-time as a single mother, and society’s standards for women as they age.

In 1987, Glenn Close received critical acclaim for her role as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. As her career was taking off, Close gave birth to her daughter Annie just one year after the blockbuster film was released.

“I feel, speaking for myself, that once you’ve given birth, as a woman, you will always be cut in half, as far as your kids are concerned,” Close told Glamour. “And if you’re a working parent, you always feel torn, and trying to maintain a balance. Annie, when she was about three, she came up to me one day and she said, ‘I want you. I want all of you.’

Close recalled: “I knew exactly what she meant, because at the time, even if I was home, if I was working on something, I would be preoccupied. And all kids want is to have their parents there.”

Now, Close said that the more she’s “lived” and “observed”, the more she’s been able to learn about family and what it means to be a parent, which is to “just [be] there”.

Annie Starke, now 34, is also an actress. Close began a relationship with her father, producer John Starke, when the two met on the set of 1982’s The World According to Garp, but separated in 1991. Throughout her entire career, the Hillbilly Elegy star said that her greatest accomplishment was raising her daughter, who she considers to be much “fiercer than I am.”

“She’s the person that I call probably the most to get her opinion about something, because she’ll have a perspective that I know I don’t have, and I need that perspective,” Close explained. “So she’s who I’m most, or what I am most, proud of. Other than that, I’m proud that I’m still around. I’m proud that I’m still in the room.”

Close also opened up about the beauty standards that are placed on women as they age. Although growing older reflects a growing “wisdom” accumulated over the years, at 75 years old, Close feels “strained” by the pressure to appear much younger than she actually is.

“I’ve always felt that my body is not really who I am,” she began, likening her body to a house. “It’s made me think about it because I’m 75, and I look out in the world and I feel like I’m looking out in the world with the energy of somebody in their 20s. And that’s who I am.”

“But I look at my arm in the morning at a certain light and I go, ‘Ah! Are you kidding me? Whose arm is this? Are you kidding?’” she continued. “I’m trying to come to the point that I just embrace my — what’s the word they use for it? Crepey skin?”

“We are so brainwashed about skin. Certainly about women’s skin,” the 101 Dalmatians star added. “The texture of your skin, and the warm, the hard, smooth bodies against the ones that are fighting to get a waist again. It’s actually fascinating to me, because as our house ages, we should get more and more interesting and interested. And yet you have this facade that people see.”

Glenn Close recently graced the Met Gala red carpet earlier this week, where she was dressed in a hot-pink Valentino suit and matching embroidered cape for her first time at the fundraising event. Close documented her preparation for fashion’s biggest night in a video diary for Vogue.

While dressed in head-to-toe fuschia, Close was asked where she was heading. The actress quipped, “I’m going to the grocery store.”