Glenn Close

Info

Full Name: Glenn Close
Date of birth: March 19, 1947 (79 years old)
Location: Greenwich, Connecticut
Country: USA

Glenn Close has been active for 44 years, participating in 50 movies that average a 6.7/10 score.

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Biography

Eight Academy Award nominations, no wins. It's a record Glenn Close shares with Peter O'Toole, and one she has been asked about so often that she long ago ran out of new ways to shrug. In June 2026 the Academy announced it would hand her an Honorary Award at the Governors Awards on 15 November, alongside Ridley Scott. It isn't the statuette she kept losing, but it's a statuette.

By then she will have been working for more than fifty years, in a career built on stage first and screen second, which is not the usual order.

A childhood inside a cult

She was born on 19 March 1947 in Greenwich, Connecticut, into a well-off New England family. When she was seven her father, William Taliaferro Close, a Harvard-trained doctor, moved the whole family into Moral Re-Armament, a religious movement she describes flatly as a cult. They stayed in it for fifteen years.

The group decided what they wore, what they could say and what they were supposed to think. Her father went off to the Congo, where he spent sixteen years and ended up as Mobutu Sese Seko's personal physician. She got out at twenty-two, while studying theatre and anthropology at the College of William & Mary, and has said it took her years to trust her own instincts again, because every judgement she had was one she'd been handed.

Broadway came first

She was a stage actor before she was a film actor and she never stopped being one. Her Broadway debut came in 1974 in 'Love for Love'. She has three Tony Awards, for 'The Real Thing' (1984), 'Death and the Maiden' (1992) and the musical 'Sunset Boulevard' (1995), in which she played Norma Desmond.

Film arrived late, at thirty-five, and arrived loudly. Her first, 'The World According to Garp' (1982), brought an Oscar nomination. So did her second, 'The Big Chill' (1983), and her third, 'The Natural' (1984). Three nominations in three years, all in the supporting category, all before most people could place her name.

Alex Forrest and the Marquise de Merteuil

The part that changed everything was Alex Forrest in 'Fatal Attraction' (1987), directed by Adrian Lyne opposite Michael Douglas. It was a global phenomenon, her first nomination as a lead, and the reason the phrase "bunny boiler" exists.

It also left a sore spot. The original ending was scrapped after test screenings and a new one shot in which her character becomes a straightforward killer. Close argued against it for weeks and has said since that the change turned a sick woman into a monster and did real damage to how mental illness is seen.

A year later came the Marquise de Merteuil in 'Dangerous Liaisons' (1988), directed by Stephen Frears with John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer. Fourth nomination, and probably the performance other actors quote back at her most.

The same stretch brought the courtroom thriller 'Jagged Edge' (1985), Gertrude in Zeffirelli's 'Hamlet' (1990) and Sunny von Bülow in 'Reversal of Fortune' (1990), narrating much of the film from a hospital bed while Jeremy Irons won an Oscar as the husband accused of putting her there.

Through the nineties she took big jobs and small ones: 'Hook' (1991), 'The House of the Spirits' (1993), 'Mars Attacks!' (1996) and the vice-president in 'Air Force One' (1997).

And Cruella de Vil, twice, in '101 Dalmatians' (1996) and '102 Dalmatians' (2000), both shot in England. She came back to the character twenty years later as an executive producer on 'Cruella' (2021). She also voiced Kala, the gorilla who raises the boy, in 'Tarzan' (1999).

The 2000s were mostly character work, often stealing scenes in other people's films: the too-perfect wife in 'The Stepford Wives' (2004), the American writer in Paris in 'Le divorce' (2003) and one strand of 'Nine Lives' (2005). Later she put in a blockbuster shift as Nova Prime in 'Guardians of the Galaxy' (2014), buried under a silver bob and a Marvel briefing scene.

Patty Hewes, Albert Nobbs and Joan Castleman

Television gave her one of her best parts when film started offering fewer. She was the lawyer Patty Hewes in 'Damages' (2007-2012), a character written without a single concession to the audience, and won two Emmys in a row for it. Before that she'd spent a season on 'The Shield'.

There was an earlier Emmy too, in 1995, for a television film she produced herself. 'Serving in Silence' told the story of Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, the highest-ranking officer discharged from the US military for being a lesbian, and NBC aired it in the middle of the argument about gay servicemen and women.

In 2011 she finally got made a project she had carried since 1982, when she played a nineteenth-century Irish butler who is secretly a woman on stage. 'Albert Nobbs' had her as co-writer, producer and star, with Janet McTeer beside her. Another nomination.

The seventh came for 'The Wife' (2017), as the wife of a Nobel-winning novelist sitting on a secret about his work. She won the Golden Globe and the SAG Award and lost the Oscar to Olivia Colman. The young Joan is played by Annie Starke, her own daughter.

The eighth, for 'Hillbilly Elegy' (2020), came with a statistical oddity attached: the same performance was nominated for a Razzie.

London, and what comes next

Britain keeps turning up in her filmography. She was the ruthless Dr Caldwell in the Birmingham-shot 'The Girl with All the Gifts' (2016) and Lady Edith in the Agatha Christie adaptation 'Crooked House' (2017).

Her West End debut came in 2016, at sixty-nine, when she brought Norma Desmond back in a Sunset Boulevard staging with English National Opera at the London Coliseum, then took it to Broadway the following year.

She is in London again now, filming 'Up to No Good' for Channel 4, a six-part adaptation of Helene Tursten's stories in which she plays Maud Oldcastle, a very old woman who is also a murderer. Richard E. Grant, Penelope Wilton and Meera Syal are among the cast.

One of her best recent parts came in 'The Summer Book' (2024), Charlie McDowell's adaptation of the Tove Jansson novel, shot on location in the Finnish archipelago. She plays a grandmother spending a summer on a tiny island with her granddaughter and son after a death in the family. The film, a British, American and Finnish co-production, had its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2024.

The rest of the diary is busy. She was one of the suspects in 'Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery' (2025) for Rian Johnson, played a divorce lawyer in Ryan Murphy's series 'All's Fair', and lent her voice to Andy Serkis' 'Animal Farm' (2025). In November she turns up as Drusilla Sickle in 'The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping'.

She also spent part of 2026 in a Spanish film. 'La bola negra', a Lorca-inspired drama by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi in which she plays Isabelle Durand alongside Penélope Cruz, won Best Director at Cannes in May and has been chosen as Spain's entry for the international feature Oscar.

Away from work she has kept things quiet. Three marriages, three divorces, the last finalised in 2015, and one daughter, Annie, born in 1988. In 2010 she set up Bring Change to Mind, a charity fighting the stigma around mental illness, after her sister Jessie was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and her nephew with a schizoaffective disorder. It's the one subject on which she reliably stops being diplomatic.