Most of us don’t live by a governing metaphor, but Glenn Close does. The 78-year-old was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, a town in the US northeast that, to the actor’s lasting annoyance, conveys an air of “smug affluence” to others. In reality, Close’s background is more complex, shaped by a childhood that was both wild and free yet traumatic, in a part of New England where her family has deep roots. “I grew up on those great stone walls of New England,” she says, chin raised, eyes sharp—like Queen Christina at the helm of a ship. “Some were six feet tall and 250 years old! I have a book called Sermons in Stone that claims more energy and labor went into building those walls than the pyramids.”
If the walls are a source of strength for Close, they also symbolize the journalist’s impression of her during our interview. She arrives in a London hotel suite wearing a military-style black suit, looking trim and composed, with a small white dog perched on a chair beside her. Throughout our conversation, her warmth and friendliness are balanced by a practiced reserve, making the dog’s presence feel like a convenient way to fill a few minutes with light chatter about breeds. (The dog is named Pip, short for “Sir Pippin of Beanfield.” He’s a purebred Havanese, and “they’re incredibly intelligent.” Like many dog owners in the US, Close has the emotional support paperwork to bring him on flights, and she laughs as she says, “That’s really what he is!”)
But none of this—neither the reserve nor the canine diversion—matters, because Glenn Close is utterly captivating. How could she not be? The intensity of her iconic roles, from Alex Forrest, the “bunny boiler” in Fatal Attraction (1987), to the maniacal Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians (1996), and the simmering protagonist Joan Castleman in The Wife (2017), makes her a rare blend of movie star and beloved character actor. Long before A-listers flocked to television, Close was delivering five seasons of Damages, the acclaimed New York legal drama that began in 2007, and her project choices remain remarkably diverse. After our meeting, she’ll fly to Berlin to film the sixth Hunger Games installment as Drusilla Sickle, then return to London for Channel 4’s drama Maud, all while appearing on Disney+ in Ryan Murphy’s new divorce series, All’s Fair, where she stars alongside—in a testament to her range—Kim Kardashian. Close, known for lobbying for roles even after rejection, has never won an Oscar. While it’s a curious oversight in Hollywood history, it somehow works in her favor, setting her apart from the grandiosity of Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett and highlighting her as a more agile and intriguing performer.
I suspect Close can be quite grand in her own way; she’s just skilled at masking it with a down-to-earth demeanor. Her latest release is Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out mystery by Rian Johnson for Netflix—the first film was fantastic, the second a mess, and this one a return to form with a star-studded cast including Andrew Scott, Josh Brolin, and Kerry Washington. (Brolin plays a Trump-like preacher in a small upstate New York town, rallying his congregation toward mutual hatred and suspicion.) Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc is funnier than ever (the best joke involves a snippet from Cats and organ music from Phantom of the Opera). But the standout role is Close as Martha Delacroix, a righteous woman trembling withWith religious fervor—or as Close describes it, “a sad character with no life outside the church”—she has the unsettling habit of appearing behind people and startling them. Close accepted the role eagerly because of Rian Johnson’s reputation. “I leapt at it!” she exclaims. “Everyone had told me what a wonderful person Rian Johnson is, and he truly is. He’s incredibly smart, funny, and wonderful. I’d marry him if he weren’t already married.” She adds with a dry pause, “And if he’d have me, at my age.”
‘Poor Martha’ is consumed by guilt and fanaticism—a role Close calls a spoof that “you have to play for real. If you try to be funny, you’re not. The humor comes from the well-written behavior.” It’s the quality of writing that often attracts Close to a project, and here, “Rian said he worked on the plot for eight months before he started writing.” Unlike the previous Knives Out film, which critiqued tech bros in a way that felt exhausting, the new movie addresses demagoguery without being preachy. “It’s not making huge statements,” Close notes, “and by the end, order is restored and hope is possible.”
Close maintains a small apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village—”where I began my career”—but her true source of hope and stability is her newer home near Bozeman, Montana. Her extended family now lives there: her sister and brother moved in the 1980s, followed by her older sister, and eventually her daughter Annie with her husband Marc, who relocated from LA and recently had their first child. Close moved there permanently in 2019 and marvels at having a close-knit family all in one place. “It’s such a gift! All the cousins will grow up together!” she says, highlighting how different it is from her own upbringing.
“I don’t live a life that says, ‘Look at who I am, I’m a big famous actress.’ I never have,” she remarks. When I mention checking her Instagram and seeing photos from a recent anti-Trump, “No Kings” march in her predominantly Republican and libertarian area, she reacts with theatrical dismay: “I’m sorry!” She explains, “Yeah, it’s very red. Bozeman has a university, making it a blue island in a red state. It was amazing how many people came and stayed the whole time with their handmade signs. I think everyone longs to express their feelings. I’ve even thought about going to the courthouse with a sign.”
Montana’s reputation can be misleading in other ways too. It’s cowboy country—”Just around the corner from me is where Robert Redford filmed The Horse Whisperer,” Close says—but it has long attracted the ultra-wealthy seeking peace and stunning scenery. Michael Keaton and David Letterman have ranches there, and Ted Turner owns one of the largest in the state. Close lives more modestly and is working on building her own community. “I’m not a hugely social person, but I have neighbors I really like, and in my little community, there’s a women’s club I’ve been to once and really enjoyed.”
In reference to her past roles, such as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987), she reflects, “She will always be relevant. To me, she’s a tragic figure.” She also appeared in the New York legal drama Damages and as Cruella de Vil.Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians (1996). Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy
Glenn Close as Martha Delacroix in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025). Photograph: John Wilson/Netflix
I can’t help but laugh out loud. The idea of a Montana version of the Women’s Institute with Glenn Close on the cake committee is… unexpected. What do they do there? “People bring little cakes. The community holds potluck dinners. You get to meet Betty Biggs, whose family has been ranching there for five generations, and she’s just a very interesting woman. I’m not someone who would typically join a ‘women’s club,’ but I really enjoyed the sense of community.”
Another striking thing about Close’s social media is that her photos fall into two clear categories: red-carpet glamour and just-woke-up casual. For a movie star, especially at 78, she’s remarkably comfortable appearing without makeup, her hair wild and untamed—like “the endless work of dreaming,” as Marilynne Robinson once wrote of a character.
“No makeup, yeah,” Close says with a sly smile.
Is her choice to go makeup-free a subtle political statement?
“I don’t see it as political. I’m lazy. And I don’t think makeup always makes you look better. It’s all about lighting. Really. So I put a lot of light on my face and can look… okay. But I don’t want to spend that much time on my face if I don’t have to.” For The Hunger Games, she spends two and a half hours a day in makeup. “So when you’re home, you don’t want to do anything. I’d much rather be myself.” And it seems to be working—Close raises a triumphant fist: “I reached 1 million followers. I don’t know who they are, but thank you.”
If Close enjoys a carefully balanced form of letting loose, it reinforces her reputation as someone who, despite her fame, prefers to stay outside the Hollywood bubble. I doubt the women’s group in Bozeman is particularly impressed by her star status. “No,” she says. “But I don’t live my life saying, ‘Look at me, I’m a big famous actress.’ I never have. I have a small house in town, and I sit on the front porch, saying hi to people as they pass by.”
Finding joy in simple things often comes most naturally to those raised to appreciate what they have. For the first time in decades, Close lives near her siblings, and they often revisit their childhood memories—sometimes “too much,” she admits. They talk about the sudden change that occurred when she was seven, when her surgeon father decided to join Moral Re-Armament, a right-wing religious cult founded in 1938 by American minister Frank Buchman, and moved the family from Connecticut to Switzerland.
Close doesn’t discuss the cult’s details publicly. She only mentions that she still has triggers from the experience, which she has called “a kind of psychological abuse wrapped in underlying misogyny.” Buchman’s movement advocated for what he termed a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship” to counter communism, and it was oddly popular, especially in Britain, where writer Daphne du Maurier was a notable follower. When Close reflects on her past, she focuses on her early years up to age seven, which she remembers as happy and free, with her and her siblings roaming unsupervised in rural Connecticut. “What has sustained me is the landscape of my childhood, which becomes part of your DNA. One of my earliest memories is being on my grandfather’s…”I grew up on a farm in the backcountry of Greenwich, which was very pastoral back then. I was a bit of a feral child—my soul needs nature.
The stereotype of New Englanders is similar to that of the English: reserved and understated. “You don’t draw attention to yourself,” Close says with a smile. “My mother—we all adored her, and she was the least materialistic woman ever. I never shopped for fun, and looking back, I realize that’s one way a girl might start to define herself. But I hate shopping.”
If Close’s mother seemed repressed, it was partly because, like many women of her generation, she didn’t have the life or opportunities her daughter later wished for her. “I think she could have been an artist. She was really good at sculpting. She might have been a writer, too.”
It’s incredible how childhood experiences stay with you—she taps her chest—right here.
What did her mother do with all that energy? Close sighs, then laughs ruefully. “She channeled it into my father. She cooked! She made him meals that he would eat in three minutes.”
Did her mother put some of that energy into shaping her?
“Oh, I was completely undefined for a very long time. I still am undefined.”
Maybe that’s better—to remain undefined rather than rigidly fitting into someone else’s mold. “Yeah, I guess so! You pull yourself together. You take all these bits and pieces, and there’s… Martha.” Or Cruella, or Joan Castleman. “I’d like to think of it as confidence. I haven’t always felt that way.”
What Close loves most about acting is piecing together the small details of a character. “For example, with my character in The Hunger Games, I started thinking about tiny details that sparked my imagination. That’s where I like to live. The same goes for my role in Maud, the Channel 4 drama—I don’t have her fully yet, and I love that process.”
She enjoys the unique challenge of building a character, but emphasizes that “it’s also collaborative. I have a wonderful wig guy, and finding the character will come from a combination of hair, makeup, and clothes. If someone can’t collaborate, they shouldn’t be in this profession. You can’t do it alone.”
In her early twenties, Close left her parents and the cult to study drama and anthropology at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. She was already married to Cabot Wade, whom she had met in a music and performance group connected to the cult. They separated within two years.
She has said that acting saved her, though it seems any significant talent would have been enough to pull her out of that world. Life moved on, and she became Glenn Close, but the memories and their impact remain. “It never leaves you,” she says. “It’s insane how what happens in your childhood stays with you,” she adds, tapping her chest, “right here.”We use Google reCAPTCHA to protect our website, and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Similarly, the coping mechanisms she developed in response to challenges are telling. When Close speaks about nature or the comfort she finds in revisiting the happy first seven years of her life, she does so with remarkable intensity. This is what I mean by her grandness—not in terms of pretentiousness or the affectation common in her industry, but an almost operatic quality that I believe stems from her need to muster the strength to overcome hardships.
After college, Close moved to New York to pursue acting. “I have a beautiful wooden troika,” she shares, “which is a Russian toy made of smooth painted wood: three horses, a sledge, and a man and a woman under a removable rug. My grandfather gave it to me; it originally belonged to my uncle, who died in World War II, and it was my treasure. I used to play with it in the snow. When I first moved to New York and set up my apartment, I bought a cheap shelf and placed the troika on it, but the shelf collapsed. The troika fell and all the horses’ legs broke. I remember sinking to the floor and sobbing.” She pauses. “It felt like all the rejection I’d faced, everything.”
She stayed there crying until a thought struck her. “I pictured stone walls. And I remember telling myself: you get up. YOU GET UP.” She hisses the words. “Get. Up.” It was a powerful, Tara-like moment. Close got up and moved on.
Interestingly, she says that despite this image of overcoming trauma, “I’m not as fierce as I seem.” She has mentioned that her daughter, Annie, is fiercer. After her first marriage, Close married twice more—to businessman James Marlas and later to David Shaw, also a businessman, from whom she divorced in 2015. In between, she had a relationship with film producer John Starke, Annie’s father. I ask how Annie is fiercer. “Oh, Annie would say when I was dating, ‘Mom, he’s an asshole.’ And I’d reply, ‘Yeah, but he wasn’t always an asshole. I mean, why is he an asshole? What happened in his childhood?’ She’d just say, ‘Mom! He’s an asshole.'”
This seems like a generational shift—from making excuses to having zero tolerance for bad behavior. “Well, my daughter is all earth, and I’m all air and water,” Close says with a smile. “I’m not into all that, but it’s interesting.”
Close is perhaps most formidable when pursuing a role. Several times in her career, she has lobbied hard for parts she knew she wasn’t favored for. When she auditioned for Fatal Attraction, she went in aware that she wasn’t the top choice, and her soul “shrank to the size of a walnut.” To land the role of Mamaw, JD Vance’s grandmother in the 2020 adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, she wrote a letter to director Ron Howard advocating for herself. And in one of her earliest stage roles, the 1976 Broadway musical Rex about Henry VIII, she botched the audition. “So I wrote a letter asking for another chance and ended up being cast as Mary Tudor.”
As Mamaw in Hillbilly Elegy (2020). Photograph: Lacey Terrell/Netflix
As the titular character in Albert Nobbs (2011). Photograph: Roadside Attractions/Sportsphoto/Allstar
If one didn’t know better, it might seem like Close’s ability to persuade directors and casting agents for another chance is a clever audition tactic. “When I auditioned for a play called Albert Nobbs, which I later made into a movie years later, I started the audition and just sucked. I stopped and said, ‘I’m boring myself to tears, so I must be boring you, and I think I’m going to…'””I’m going to go home.” And at the end of that day, they called my agent and said, “That’s the most interesting thing that happened to us all day.” She admits she was “terrible at auditioning” and after that particular failure, she hired an acting coach recommended by Kevin Kline. “I told him I really wanted this part, worked with him, went back, and got the role.”
Regarding Hillbilly Elegy, both the film and the book have been tainted by their association with President Trump’s vice-president. Does the fact that the film portrays the origin story of JD Vance tarnish her memory of making it? “No, not at all. I spent time meeting [Mamaw’s] daughter and a niece, observing how she sat, talked, laughed, and held her cigarette. I looked at what was in her house and formed very specific ideas. I don’t regret it at all. I think a woman like that is often looked down upon, and I believe I did her justice and loved her.”
Given the time Close spent researching Vance’s extended family in Appalachia, does she have any insight into why that region shifted so decisively to Trump? “I love reading history, and great leaders throughout history have been very eloquent. We haven’t had… I think Obama was eloquent, but I’ve noticed a lack of the kind of eloquence needed to bring people together. You need to be sensitive to what people are going through and able to communicate with them. I think people started to feel that nobody cares.”
While Close is often associated with characters like Mamaw or Albert Nobbs, her most enduring role is undoubtedly Alex Forrest, the book editor turned stalker who haunted the nightmares of cheating men in the late 1980s and beyond. Almost 40 years later, many who saw it as teenagers still vividly remember the most gruesome jump scares. “It really holds up,” says Close. “Kids are still watching it. I did some masterclasses at Indiana University’s theatre department, and before I started, I wanted the students to see Fatal Attraction. They came in afterward with their mouths open.”
Is the character of Forrest, whom the film treated with a scorn that now seems starkly misogynistic, still relevant? “I think she will always be relevant,” Close says. “To me, she’s a tragic figure.”
This brings us, in a roundabout way, to Kim Kardashian. All’s Fair, the new Ryan Murphy drama for Disney+, features an impressive cast of women, including Naomi Watts and Sarah Paulson, and it’s surprising to think of them acting alongside Kim Kardashian in her first major role. One might guess that the quality of the writing wasn’t the main draw for taking the job, but it sounds like it was fun. So, what was it like working with Kardashian?
“She’s lovely! And very smart. She’s very conscientious with her kids. While we were filming, she was working toward her law degree, and near the end, she had flashcards. She now has her law degree, and I asked her if she’s going to practice. She said no, she just wants it in her back pocket.”
But she has no acting background at all. “No, but she surrounded herself with really good people.” Close points to herself and bursts out laughing. If that sounds arrogant, she adds, “I swear to God, I’ve seen all nine episodes, and it’s pretty fucking good. It is what it is: juicy, outrageous at times, and touching.”
What is so striking about Close’s current slate of performances…One of the most striking things about her is the incredible energy she can summon. I tell her I’m 49 and tired most of the time.
“Shame on you!” she shouts. Well, yes, I say, but I don’t have your wall system.
“You have walls all over your country!” I know, but Hadrian’s Wall doesn’t work as a metaphor for me. Anyway, the real question is: how does she do it? “I’m energized when I need to be. I’m very good when I’m working, when I have a schedule to follow. I’m not necessarily that good when I’m at home trying to decide what to do next, because I always just want to read a book, and I know I can’t do that.”
It seems to me that Close has spent her life pushing through with a determination to be happy. But I wonder if she thinks that ability is innate or comes from sheer force of will? “Good question. I think when I’m with my family, I’m very happy. I’ve been unlucky in love, which is sad. It’s not something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, but I’m happy that my daughter has a partner for life. In fact, none of my generation in my family have been successful in their relationships, except my brother. We’ve all had multiple marriages. But I think the next generation is much more… I think they’ve found life mates, and that’s fantastic.” She laughs. “But I… don’t mope around.”
“GET UP!!” I exclaim, startling us both.
“Get up,” hisses Close.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is in cinemas from November 28 and on Netflix from December 12.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about Glenn Close based on her personal revelations designed with clear questions and direct answers
General Beginner Questions
Q What cult was Glenn Close a part of as a child
A She was part of a conservative moralistic group called Moral ReArmament which she has described as being like a cult
Q Why does Glenn Close say she isnt as intimidating as she appears
A She explains that her powerful onscreen roles have created that image but in real life she is more vulnerable sensitive and prone to anxiety
Q Has Glenn Close ever been married
A Yes she has been married four times to three different men She has stated that she struggled with making her marriages work
Q What are some of the famous movie roles that made her seem intimidating
A Some of her most famous intimidating roles are Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons and Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians
Advanced Detailed Questions
Q How did her upbringing in the MRA group affect her later life and career
A She has said it made her feel like an outsider and gave her a deep desire to understand human psychology which she channels into her acting It also caused her to rebel against its strict repressive rules
Q What was her experience protesting against Trump
A She participated in the Womens March in 2017 She has spoken about it as an act of standing up for democracy and human rights feeling it was a crucial moment to use her voice
Q What has she revealed about her experiences with love and relationships
A She has been open about her relationship struggles including her divorces She has expressed that she believes in love but has also faced heartbreak and the challenge of balancing her career with her personal life
Q Does she have any children
A Yes she has one daughter Annie Maude Starke from her relationship with producer John Starke
Q How has she managed the public perception of her being intimidating versus her private self
A She has learned to embrace the power of her roles while being publicly open about her own insecurities and anxieties showing a more complete
