Glenn Close

• 1. Introduction

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  Glenn Close has been nominated for eight Academy Awards and has never won one. No other actress has been nominated so many times without a win. Her shelf is hardly empty, though. She has three Primetime Emmy Awards, three Tony Awards and three Golden Globe Awards, and in 2019 Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. How does a performer collect honors on stage, on television and on film across five decades, and still wait on the one that matters most to the public? The answer begins with a girl raised inside a strict movement, long before any camera found her. It runs through some of the most unsettling characters ever put on screen. And it ends with what she chose to do with her fame once she had it.

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• 2. A Childhood Inside a Movement

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  Glenn Close was born on the 19th of March 1947 in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her mother, Bettine, was a socialite. Her father, William Taliaferro Close, was a doctor who ran a clinic in the Belgian Congo and served as personal physician to the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. She has two sisters, Tina and Jessie, and two brothers, Alexander, nicknamed Sandy, and Tambu Misoki. Her parents adopted the brothers while living in Congo. Rumors claim her birth name was Glenda Veronica Close, but she has confirmed that it was simply Glenn.

  A stone cottage on her maternal grandfather's estate in Greenwich was home for her earliest years. She has credited those days of running free in the Connecticut countryside, playing whatever character a game demanded, for making acting feel natural. Despite the wealth around her, she says her family stayed out of WASP society. She also avoided naming Greenwich as her birthplace, because she did not want people to see a dilettante who never had to work.

  When Close was seven years old, her parents joined the Moral Re-Armament, known as MRA, and her family stayed involved for 15 years. They lived in communal centers. Close has called the movement a cult that governed everything from the clothes she wore to the words she was permitted to say. Her schooling took her to St. George's School in Switzerland and then to Rosemary Hall, now Choate Rosemary Hall, where she graduated in 1965. In the mid-to-late 1960s she toured with the nonprofit singing group Up With People.

  Inside that group she organized a small act called the Green Glenn Singers, with Kathe Green, Jennie Dorn and Vee Entwistle. Their stated mission was to write and sing songs that gave people a purpose. At 22, Close broke away from MRA. She says she has long forgiven her parents, who had their reasons, but she believes what saved her most was her wish to become an actress.

  At The College of William & Mary she double majored in theater and anthropology. In her senior year she watched Katharine Hepburn being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show, and it pushed her toward acting as a career. Howard Scammon, the long-time theater professor, trained her seriously. In Williamsburg she also performed in The Common Glory, a summer outdoor drama written by the Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Green. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as well. Decades later, the college named the main stage in its renovated Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall the Glenn Close Theatre.

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• 3. Life on the Boards

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  In 1974, at the age of 27, Close made her professional debut in Love for Love, directed by Hal Prince at the Helen Hayes Theatre. The job grew out of a phone call. In her senior year she had asked her college theater department to nominate her for auditions run by the University Resident Theatre Association and TCG. A callback followed, and she was hired for one season of three plays.

  Television came in 1975 with a small role in the anthology series Great Performances. That same year she played Cordelia in King Lear at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. In 1976 she appeared as Mary I in Rex, a short-lived Broadway musical with a score by Richard Rodgers and Sheldon Harnick.

  From September 1978 to April 1979, she played Irene St. Claire in The Crucifer of Blood on Broadway, alongside Paxton Whitehead and Dwight Schultz. Her last major stage role before her film career was Chairy, the female lead in the musical Barnum, which ran from April 1980 to March 1981. It brought her first Tony Award nomination.

  Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, directed by Mike Nichols, gave her the first of her three Tonys, for the role of Annie. In 1992 she won her second, for Death and the Maiden.

  The third came from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard, where she played Norma Desmond, a faded film star. The Broadway run lasted through 1993-94. Critic David Richards of The New York Times wrote that she was giving one of those legendary performances people would still be discussing years later. He said she took breathtaking risks, venturing so far out on a limb that you feared it would snap, and it never did.

  In the summer of 2012 she voiced The Giant in Into the Woods at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Amy Adams played The Baker's Wife and Donna Murphy played The Witch. In 2014 she took the role of Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance at the Public Theater in New York, alongside Kevin Kline, Martin Short and Anika Noni Rose.

  October 2014 brought her back to Broadway as Agnes in Pam MacKinnon's revival of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance at the John Golden Theatre. John Lithgow, Martha Plimpton and Lindsay Duncan co-starred. The show grossed $884,596 over eight preview performances in the week ending the 25th of October, a house record for the theater. Reviews were mixed, though the cast drew praise.

  In April 2016 she returned to Norma Desmond, 23 years after first playing her, in an English National Opera production in London. The Times and The Daily Telegraph each gave it five stars. A chest infection forced her to cancel three shows and put her in the hospital, but she recovered and finished the run. She won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical Performance, earned her first Olivier Award nomination, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame that year.

  The London production moved to the Palace Theatre on Broadway, opening on the 9th of February 2017 for a limited run that sold tickets through the 25th of June. Its 40-piece orchestra was the largest in Broadway history. The New York Times called her work one of the great stage performances of this century. Also in 2017 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Theatre World Awards. From September to December 2018 she was back at the Public Theater in the Off-Broadway play Mother of the Maid.

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• 4. Breakthrough Years

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  In 1980, director George Roy Hill spotted Close on Broadway and asked her to audition opposite Robin Williams for The World According to Garp. It became her first film role and her first Oscar nomination. She played Williams's feminist mother, even though she was only four years older than he was.

  Director Lawrence Kasdan said he wrote Sarah Cooper in The Big Chill specifically with Close in mind. The film drew good reviews and made money. It also made Close the third actor to receive Tony, Emmy and Oscar nominations in a single calendar year.

  In 1984, Robert Redford's baseball drama The Natural gave her a small supporting part and a third straight Oscar nomination. She credits the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. As she tells it, the hat was designed to let sunlight pour through, and the crew waited for the right time of day so the sun shone through the back of the stadium. A lens muted the crowd around her. She believes that shot is the reason she was nominated.

  That same year she starred opposite Robert Duvall in The Stone Boy, about a family coping after the youngest child accidentally kills his older brother in a hunting accident. She also starred in the television film Something About Amelia, about a family destroyed by sexual abuse. It earned her first Emmy nomination.

  Close then went looking for different roles, because she did not want to be typecast as a motherly figure. The 1985 romantic comedy Maxie, with Mandy Patinkin, brought her a second Golden Globe nomination for favorable reviews, but critics panned the film and it under-performed at the box office.

  Jagged Edge, also from 1985, put her opposite Jeff Bridges in a legal thriller. Jane Fonda had been attached first but was replaced after asking for script changes. Producer Martin Ransohoff objected to Close, saying she was too ugly for the part. When she heard, she refused to have him on set during her scenes. Director Richard Marquand backed her and sent Ransohoff away. Furious, Ransohoff went to the studio heads to demand that both of them be fired. They declined, saying they liked the work. The film grossed $40-million on a $15-million budget.

  In 1990 she played Sunny von Bülow opposite Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune, to critical acclaim. The film dealt with the Claus von Bülow murder trial while the real Sunny von Bülow was still in a vegetative state, and her children publicly criticized it. The same year Close played Gertrude in Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, her first Shakespeare role on screen.

  In 1992 she won Best Actress, the Golden Ciak, at the Venice Film Festival for Meeting Venus. That year she also became a trustee emeritus of the Sundance Institute. A year earlier, she had turned up as a pirate in a cameo for Steven Spielberg's Hook.

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• 5. Playing Danger

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  In 1987, Close played Alex Forrest, a disturbed book editor, in the psychological thriller Fatal Attraction. It was the highest-grossing film worldwide that year. A scene from it even gave the dictionary the phrase "bunny boiler." Close herself says the role pulled her away from the good, nurturing women she had been playing.

  During the re-shoot of the ending, her head smashed against a mirror and she suffered a concussion. At the hospital she learned, to her horror, that she was a few weeks pregnant with her daughter. She says she prepared for this film more than for any other. It brought her fourth Oscar nomination, her first in a leading role, along with the People's Choice Award for Favorite Motion Picture Actress. The character later ranked number 7 on the AFI list of 100 years of heroes and villains.

  In 1988 she played the scheming Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons. Reviews were stellar, and she received her fifth Oscar nomination and her first BAFTA nomination. Playwright Christopher Hampton had worked on the stage version and cast her in the film. He says she conveys a sense of strength and intelligence with ease.

  In 1996 she played Cruella de Vil in Stephen Herek's live-action 101 Dalmatians, based on Disney's 1967 animated film. Critics praised her universally, and she earned a Golden Globe nomination. The film grossed $320.6 million against a $75 million budget. Her contract let her keep her film costumes. The producers wanted to copy her expensive wardrobe, but she refused and kept the originals. She rented costumes out to exhibits, and lent a Dangerous Liaisons dress to Madonna for the 1990 VMA performance of "Vogue." In 2017 she donated her entire collection to Indiana University Bloomington.

  She returned to the role in 102 Dalmatians in 2000, which got mixed reviews but did well at the box office. In 2021 she was an executive producer on Cruella, directed by Craig Gillespie, in which Emma Stone plays the younger Cruella.

  As for the television series Damages, The New York Times declared that no actor dead or alive was as scary as a smiling Glenn Close. Journalist Christopher Hooton grouped her with Christopher Walken and Al Pacino, performers who seem like ticking time bombs.

  People who work with her describe someone very different. Iain Glen, her co-star in a 2002 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, says she is often called glacial or distant, but in person is the opposite, warm and intimate. He says she found real softness in the role.

  Harold Guskin, the acting coach who also mentored Kevin Kline, Bridget Fonda and James Gandolfini, taught her to read the lines off the page and to remember to breathe. She found method acting interesting but not her preferred style. Good acting, she says, is like being a magician, because people are only moved when they believe. As an audience member, she does not want to be aware of acting. Film historian Cari Beauchamp places her among the top actresses since sound came in, alongside Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Meryl Streep.

  On the 12th of January 2009 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard, in front of the Roosevelt Hotel. By 2018, films featuring her had grossed over $1.3 billion in North America.

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• 6. The Small Screen Turn

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  In 1995, Close played Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer in the television film Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story. It won her first Primetime Emmy Award. She produced it with Barbra Streisand, and both were nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie.

  That same year she began voicing Mona Simpson on The Simpsons. Entertainment Weekly named her one of the 16 best guest stars in the show's history. She hosted Saturday Night Live in 1989 and again in 1992. Her Hallmark Hall of Fame film Sarah, Plain and Tall, from 1991, was followed by two sequels. In 2001 she played Nellie Forbush in a production of South Pacific on ABC.

  In 2002 she guest-starred on Will and Grace as a satirical version of Annie Leibovitz, which brought an Emmy nomination. In 2003 she played Eleanor of Aquitaine in the Showtime film The Lion in Winter, winning a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

  In 2005 she joined the FX crime series The Shield as Monica Rawling, a no-nonsense precinct captain. It was her first role in a regular series. She felt the move was right because television was in a golden era. FX chief John Landgraf said the network was the first to bring a female movie star of her stature to television.

  Shortly after The Shield, FX executives pitched her a series of her own. In 2007 she began a five-season run as Patty Hewes, a ruthless and brilliant lawyer, in Damages. She won two consecutive Emmys for the role, and became the first cable show's lead actress to win in the drama category. She earned $200,000 per episode, making her one of the highest-paid actresses on cable. She calls Patty the role of her life, and she stayed friends with co-star Rose Byrne.

  While the show was on the air, in 2008, she performed at Carnegie Hall. She narrated The Runaway Bunny, a concerto for reader, violin and orchestra composed and conducted by Glen Roven. When Damages ended, she said she would not return to a regular television role, though she stayed open to a miniseries or guest spot.

  In 2015 she made a cameo on Louis C.K.'s Louie, in the episode "Sleepover," with John Lithgow, Michael Cera and Matthew Broderick. In 2017 she starred in Sea Oak, an Amazon comedy pilot, which viewers voted on. It got favorable reviews but was not picked up.

  In 2022 she appeared in season two of the Apple TV+ thriller Tehran, and she learned Persian for the role. She also played former Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow in The New Look, reuniting with Damages creator Todd A. Kessler. In August 2025 she was announced for Up to No Good, a six-part Channel 4 crime drama based on two story collections by the Swedish writer Helene Tursten.

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• 7. The Gold That Slipped Away

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  In December 2010, Close began filming Albert Nobbs in Dublin, a project she had worked on for almost twenty years. She co-wrote the script and produced the film. She had won an Obie in 1982 for playing the role on stage. Albert Nobbs is a woman living as a man in 19th-century Ireland after being sexually assaulted as a young girl. Close said she reached a point of asking whether she was willing to live the rest of her life having given up on it, and decided she was not. Rodrigo Garcia directed, and Mark Williams, her 101 Dalmatians co-star, appeared with her.

  The film received mixed reviews, but her subtle and introverted performance drew acclaim and an Oscar nomination. During the awards campaign she said she had never understood people who hyperventilate about winning. Do the simple math, she argued, given how many actors are out of work and how many films are made. If you are one of five nominees, how could you think of yourself as a loser?

  The Wife, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, gave her Joan Castleman, a woman questioning her life choices while traveling to Stockholm. Her husband is there to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The film adapts Meg Wolitzer's novel, and Close's daughter, Annie Starke, plays the younger Joan. Close won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award and the Critics' Choice Movie Award.

  It was her seventh Oscar nomination and her fourth for Best Actress. She was widely seen as the frontrunner, but Olivia Colman won for The Favourite. Colman also beat her for the BAFTA, her second nomination for that prize.

  Hillbilly Elegy, released on Netflix on the 24th of November 2020 and directed by Ron Howard, cast her as the Mamaw of future Vice President JD Vance, opposite Amy Adams. Reviews of the film were generally negative, but her performance was praised. Richard Roeper called it masterful and pitch-perfect, and Peter Travers of ABC News called her simply sensational. She earned supporting actress nominations from the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild, and the San Francisco International Film Festival's Award for Acting. She also drew a Razzie nomination, becoming the third performer, after James Coco for Only When I Laugh and Amy Irving for Yentl, nominated for both awards for one performance.

  On the 17th of January 2025, Netflix released Back in Action, in which she appeared with Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz and Kyle Chandler. She then played the devout church lady Martha Delacroix in Wake Up Dead Man, the sequel to Knives Out and Glass Onion. Daniel Craig, Jeremy Renner, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Josh O'Connor and Kerry Washington co-starred. Her filming was delayed after just two days when she was hit hard by both COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus. The film reached Netflix on the 12th of December 2025 to highly positive reviews.

  The Black Ball, in which she plays Isabelle Durand, an American scholar devoted to Lorquian research, premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. In May 2026 the TCM Classic Film Festival honored her with a Hand & Footprint Ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and she presented Dangerous Liaisons there.

  On the 20th of November 2026, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is set for release, with Close as Drusilla Sickle. She is also attached to Encores, a retirement home comedy reuniting her with Jeremy Irons, and a remake of the Argentine film Cama adentro with Melissa McCarthy, directed by Pamela Adlon. One project loops back to her stage triumph: a film adaptation of Sunset Boulevard in which she would reprise Norma Desmond, still in development.

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• 8. Beyond the Spotlight

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  In 2010, Glenn Close announced that she had her DNA sequenced to draw attention to her family's history of mental illness. She is a founder and the chairperson of Bring Change to Mind, a US campaign against the stigma around mental illness, inspired in part by her sister Jessie, who has bipolar disorder. Close contributed chapters to Jessie's 2015 book, Resilience: Two Sisters and a Story of Mental Illness.

  In July 2013 she auctioned more than 380 designer items from the wardrobe of Patty Hewes on eBay, with proceeds going to the charity. Ron Howard directed the foundation's first public service announcement, and John Mayer lent his song "Say." That year she also addressed the White House in support of the Excellence in Mental-Health Act. President Obama signed it in April 2014, providing $1.1 billion in funding to strengthen the mental-health-care system. She received the WebMD Health Hero award in 2015. On the 16th of June 2016, she donated $75,000 to the Mental-Health Association of Central Florida to fund counseling for victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting.

  In 1989, Close attended pro-choice marches in Washington, D.C., with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda. In 1998 she joined a star-studded cast performing The Vagina Monologues at a benefit that raised $250,000 in a single evening for efforts to stop violence against women. She won a GLAAD Media Award in 2002. She also produced a documentary for Puppies Behind Bars, which provides service dogs for wounded war veterans.

  She is a trustee of the Wildlife Conservation Society, a volunteer at Fountain House in New York City, and a founding member of the Panthera Conservation Advisory Committee, which works to protect the world's 36 species of wild cats. She supports the foundation of her late friend Christopher Reeve and sits on the CuriosityStream Advisory Board. Her political donations have mostly gone to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, John Edwards, Angus King and Barack Obama. She spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

  In 2007 she co-founded FetchDog, a catalog and website for dog accessories, where she published interviews with other celebrities about their dogs. She sold it in 2012. In the early 1990s she owned a coffee shop in Bozeman, Montana, which she sold in 2006. She sold her apartment in The Beresford for $10.2 million in 2011. She runs a 1,000 acre ranch in Wyoming. As of 2016 she primarily lives in Bedford Hills, New York. Trillium Productions Inc., where she is president, is the company behind several of the productions described here.

  Her first marriage, from 1969 to 1971, was to Cabot Wade, a guitarist and songwriter she knew from Up With People. She calls it kind of an arranged marriage. From 1979 to 1983 she lived with the actor Len Cariou, and from 1984 to 1987 she was married to grocery heir James Marlas. She met producer John Starke on the set of The World According to Garp. Their daughter, Annie Starke, was born in 1988 and is an actress. They separated in 1991, and that year she had a five-month relationship with Woody Harrelson.

  In 1995 she became engaged to Steve Beers, a carpenter who had worked on Sunset Boulevard. The relationship ended in 1999. In February 2006 she married the venture capitalist David Evans Shaw in Maine, and they divorced in August 2015. Her first grandchild was born in February 2025.

  In the first episode of the seventh season of Finding Your Roots, she learned that she is related to Diana, Princess of Wales, through seven-times great-grandparents. She is also distantly related to Clint Eastwood, and some of her ancestors were slaveholders. Marjorie Post was once married to her grandfather, Edward Bennett Close. Close describes herself as spiritual but irreligious. A devoted New York Mets fan, she has sung the national anthem at Shea Stadium and Citi Field many times since 1986.

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