After a childhood that involved her family's joining the fundamentalist and evangelical moral rearmament group and traveling to Switzerland and the Congo, where her father worked as a missionary, Glenn Close returned to the United States and attended Rosemary Hall, an exclusive private high school. After graduation she worked with "Up with People" but found the troupe boring. After her marriage to a rock guitarist failed, she enrolled in the College of William and Mary, where she began to participate in theatrical productions.
Glenn Close's theatrical career began in 1974, when she acted for a season with the Phoenix Repertory Company, and she worked steadily in regional theaters, as well as in Broadway and Off-Broadway plays. She has received a Tony nomination for Barnum (1980) and Tony awards for Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (1984), Death and the Maiden, and as Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard. Glenn Close, who continued her career in the theater, went to the West Coast in 1979 and appeared in two excellent films made for television, Too Far to Go and The Orphan Train, in which she takes some orphans out West in hopes of finding better lives for them. Her performance led to her role as Garp's mother in The World According to Garp (1982), an adaptation of John Irving's novel.
Her performance won her an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress, and she won Best Supporting Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics, the New York Film Critics, and the National Board of Review. The following year she won another Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Big Chill. Another Best Supporting Actress nomination came the next year when she played the good Iris, the lady in white, in Barry Levinson's film adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural.
That same year she played opposite Robert Duvall in the highly regarded The Stone Boy, a tale of how a family copes with one son accidentally killing the other one. After Maxie and The Jagged Edge, both 1985, she starred in Fatal Attraction (1987), a film that gave many philandering husbands nightmares. In the film, she played a woman spurned but determined to wreak havoc in the lives of the man (Michael Douglas) and his family. This time, Glenn Close was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress. In 1989, she made two films, one the forgettable Immediate Family and the other the wonderfully corrupt Dangerous Liaisons, an adaptation of the Laclos novel and the Christopher Hampton play. Cast with John Malkovich, she played the malevolent force that causes the Malkovich character to destroy the woman he loves while he utters the dreadful words, "It's beyond my control." She was again nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress.
For Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990) she played Hamlet's mother. The same year, as the comatose wife of Claus von Bulow, she narrated the action in Reversal of Fortune. In 1991 she played a Swedish opera diva in Meeting Venus, but her performance in the made-for-television film Sarah, Plain and Tall, which was nominated for nine Emmys, was a more outstanding role. She played a New England schoolteacher who goes out west to care for the family of a widower who is seeking a wife. Two years later she returned to this role in Skylark, in which she is the wife who yearns to return to New England. That year she also appeared with Meryl Streep in the film adaptation of Isabel Allende's novel House of the Spirits, followed by The Paper (1994), in which she plays an ambitious, aggressive managing editor, much like her character in Fatal Instinct.
In the television film Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995), Glenn Close essayed a quite different role as the army nurse who has attained the rank of colonel, only to find herself under media scrutiny when she admits that she is a lesbian. Glenn Close received an Emmy for her performance. In 1996 she was cast with Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, a lampoon of alien flicks, and appeared as Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the Disney animated film that would soon be followed by 102 Dalmatians. On television Glenn Close played a compassionate mother of a son dying of AIDS in In the Gloaming (1997). She also played nurse Nellie Forbush in the television remake of Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific (2001) and was praised for her performance. More recently Glenn Close appeared in Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune (1999). As of this writing she is the best actress of her generation never to have received an Oscar for Best Actress.
Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Webworldarticles.com is a free articles resource thus practically any visitor can submit an article. However if you notice any copyrighted material, please contact us and we will remove the article(s) in discussion right away.
This article was sent to us by:
Ralph Dimblers at
07202010
1. Gilbert Andreson alias Broncho Billy and early Hollywood
All articles in this directory are property of their respective authors. Additionally, read our Privacy Policy
© 2010 WebWorldarticles.com - All Rights Reserved.