The New Yorker Radio Hour - Glenn Close Doesn’t Play Evil (with One Exception)

Episode Date: May 8, 2018

Last year, Glenn Close was on Broadway as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” reprising a role she had originally played in 1993. Since 1974, when she made her début on Broadway, she has won three Tony Awards and three Emmys, and has been nominated six times for an Oscar.  Like Desmond, many of Glenn Close’s characters could be described as “difficult”: sometimes scary and possibly insane, but, above all, just complicated. But Close bridles at the notion that any of them—even Alex Forrest, the unhinged lover she played unforgettably in “Fatal Attraction”— villains.  “I don’t think of them as evil,” Close said to The New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman,  at the New Yorker Festival in 2017. “The only evil character I’ve ever played was Cruella!”    New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNMIC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. American theater and film don't have too many people you could legitimately describe at any given moment as a master. Merrill Streep and a few others, it's a pretty short list, but certainly near the top of the list, is Glenn Close. Last year, Close was on Broadway playing Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. And like Desmond, many of Glenn Close's characters could be described as difficult, sometimes scary, maybe a little crazy, but above all, just complicated. And since 1974, when she made her debut on Broadway, she's won three Tonys, three Emmys, and been nominated six times for an Oscar. At the New Yorker Festival in 2017, Glenn Close spoke with the New Yorker's Michael Schulman, who covers theater for the magazine.

So you used to what actually save me more than anything else was my due to the United States. desire to be an actress. So let's talk about that. You attended the College of of Boyman Mary and studied acting there and then moved to New York in the early 70s. There was this amazing story of kind of the showbiz myth of the young understudy going on for the lead and then launching her stardom from there. Is that sort of how that actually happened in that place? Well, it wasn't 42nd Street. It sounds a lot like it. It was a congreene. It was a congreave restoration. comedy.

But I was understudying a beautiful actress Mary Yore and I was given a little part in each production but I was understanding the leads and I was so green

and hungry and I would go to every rehearsal and sit in the back and I would just observe I would observe and for some reason I learned the lines during that those weeks rehearsal. And we went out to Philadelphia and Mary was having problems, remembering her lines and other things. And so we came back to New York. We're at the old Helen Hayes Theater

that doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately. I walked in and there was Hal and he said, Glenn. And it brought me out into the stage and he said, I'm thinking about letting Miss York go. I will make my decision during this matinee performance. if I decide to let her go, I want you to go on tonight. Can you do it? And I said, yes. But I had not had a rehearsal.

He said, okay, so after the show, go up to your dressing room, which was like on the fourth floor of this little garret of a dressing room, wait, and if you hear that you're wanted down in costumes, that means that you'll go on. that night. So I went up to my dressing room, shaking, and waited,

all the other actors went off to dinner. And after a while I heard, will Glenn Close please come down to the costume? And the thing about that production was that everybody had one costume. And so I put on her costume, filled with her perfume, and her wig that was still, you know, sweaty. and the thing that's remarkable was that at half hour there was a knock on my door

and I was handed a note and I opened it and it said it's a tradition in the English theater for one leading lady to welcome the next I welcome you be brave and strong Mary Yore That's amazing story

amazing. And in her pain, she had the grace to do that for me. It's astounding. She didn't say break a leg or knock them dead. She said be brave and strong. And the next spring, she died. Wow. That the greatest lesson about the profession was that after that show was over, I I went back up to my fourth-story dressing room from the, you know, stars dressing room and finished out the run as little parts as an understudy. Not only did you come from Connecticut, but your ancestors helped found Greenwich, Connecticut. Is that right?

And you're 12th generation American, is that correct? Yes. And I read that you, in your early childhood, you lived in a stone cottage on a farm, which seems very like the platonic ideal of Connecticut. I mean, was there a kind of society life that your family was part of, a kind of blue-blooded set? My grandparents, on both sides certainly were,

my parents were very much black sheep. They didn't buy into all that. So in my early childhood, we lived on my grandfather, Moore's farm, and we could have been an island. as far as we were concerned. I see. Your parents also enrolled your whole family in this thing called the moral rearmament,

which you've described as a cult-like group that kind of dictated how you lived and what you were supposed to feel. And if you said, I'm treading very lightly on this subject because I know it's a difficult one, but you've said you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire. And there were these kind of... Well, maybe I should say any natural desire. Uh-huh. So my question is you were in this organization, I think, from ages 7 to 22.

Was having to modify your behavior, was that helpful when you started to act, or was it something you had to overcome? I mean, sort of having all your instincts scrambled like that. That's a lot to answer. I will say this, that the seven years I had in the Connecticut countryside probably has sustained me more in my life than any other thing. What happened afterwards, I have very little memory of. I mean, I can try to reconstruct things, but you're totally pulled up from what your roots were

and what you loved and your family is pulled apart and these things are imposed on you. And for a child with the kind of imagination that I had, I, of course, wanted to be the good soldier. And I think the group became my parent in a way. And it's very, very destructive. I think one good thing is that my parents always made sure we had a good education.

Some kids would go and be too, We never did that, and I think that was very, very good. So let's skip ahead to when you began your film career in 1982. We're going to watch a clip from your first film, The World According to Garp. You played Garp's mother. She's a kind of nurse-slash feminist guru who doesn't believe in lust or something and has very particular thoughts about intercourse and reproduction. And here she is explaining to young Garp and another guy how he was conceived.

Let's take a look. The war was on. I was a nurse. One day they brought in a tail gunner who had been wounded by anti-aircraft in a raid over Germany. A splinter of steel had lodged in his brain and all he could say was his name, Garp. For medical reasons I couldn't quite understand, he also had a constant erection. He deteriorated steadily. until one day all he could say was part of his name.

Ah, it was then that I knew that he wouldn't last much longer. His erections continued, however, quite unabated. I see. Not yet, no, not yet. You'd better rest. Anyway, where was I? He kept having erections. I feel like that child actor learned a few things during that scene.

So this is such an unusual great, wacky movie. One thing that's so striking about it is that it's your first movie. You were 35, and you start the film as a young mother. You ended as a grandmother, and your son eventually is played by Rob Williams, who was four years younger than you. I mean, how did you approach something like that on film, no less, playing this kind of ageless character? Well, we rehearsed. It was George Roy Hill, and he had started it in live television. So what he did, and it was

Robin Williams' second movie. He was huge star from Morgan Mindy, and then he had done Popeye, and this was his second film. And George, the company rented space up at Columbia, and they put down the tape on the

floors if we were rehearsing a play, and we rehearsed the movie. And then when the sets were ready, we moved to the old Astoria studio and rehearsed there. with the cameraman. So that was something I understood, and I was able to get into the character.

Yeah, so for me, it was really serendipitous to start that way. And I remember going up to George and saying, I hear it's a really, really difficult transition to go from stage to film. And he said, yeah. And I said, I hope you'll tell you'll take care of me. And he did. So you followed this movie with a bunch of films like the

natural and the big chill in roles that you've described as earth mothers. Was there a conscious decision somewhere in the mid-80s to like make a huge swerve into like femme fatals? Was it conscious? Was it, was there? No, I was just lucky to get the part. I mean, They really didn't want me for Fatal Attraction, and they didn't even want me to audition. And it was because of my agent that they actually begrudged me in audition. And that got me the part.

But they were, I mean, it's hilarious to hear about that now. Of course, because we can't think of a single other person playing the role of Alex Forrest. Let's take a look at a scene from Fatal Attraction. This is Alex Confirious. confronting Michael Douglas' character, Dan, after their affair. I want this child. There's nothing to do with you.

I wonder whether you're going to be a part of it or not. Why are you telling me? Why? Why? Why just go ahead and do it? I was hoping that you would want to be a part of it. I'm 36 years old. It may be my last chance to have a child. Alex, think what you're saying. We are going to live with this for the rest of our lives.

I know, you can't. I've thought of that. I know how you feel it's a big thing. But it doesn't have to be a problem. Really, it doesn't. You play fair with me. I'll play fair with you. No.

What does it like revisiting that movie that I'm sure so many people associate you with, still to this day? Is that why I don't ever get any dates? Wow, I haven't seen that in a very long time. What was your question? Well, so I wanted to ask you, I mean, this movie has recently been kind of back in consciousness, especially because of its 30th anniversary.

And when it came out, it got this sort of feminist pushback and probably saved a lot of married men from making really bad mistake. But, you know, it also kind of, it's possible to look back and see a kind of Reagan-era family values. You know, this is this suburban nuclear family that must be protected from the intruder, and people have interpreted it that way a lot. How do you view the politics of the movie?

I honestly didn't think about politics when I was making the film. My personal feeling now, that looking back, feminism happened. And I think that movie came at a certain time where it just touched on this incredibly raw nerve and became the phenomenon that it became. I was shocked by certain feminists were against it saying that it gave single working women

a bad name. My feeling was that I wasn't generally acting. I was acting somebody very specific, and that was her story. Also, there's a lot about that character that the audience doesn't know that I had in my head and that I had done work with psychiatrists is about.

I mean, it's a famous story. The original ending was so upsetting where Alex kills herself because she's basically a self-destructive suicidal personality. And the audience was so

upset that they honestly didn't think she was punished enough. And they hated the ending because he went off to jail. But she's considered one of the great villains on film. And I find that highly ironic, you know, given what I went through to... Right. Well, I know in recent years you've been active in mental illness awareness. And so I wanted to ask you a little bit about that.

How did that start? It started because my sister Jesse came to me one day and said, I need your help because I can't stop thinking about killing myself. And my mother and I were able to get her to a place that finally, at age 51, she was properly diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And I've learned so much. We started something called bring change. to mind, which fights against the stigma.

And I think if all more families, as a family, could talk about it, I think it would be a different world. We're going to watch a scene from, I think, the very next movie you did, Dangerous Liaisons. This is an incredible specimen of film acting. This is your character in the Marquis explaining sort of how she moves through the world and why. So let's take a look at Dangerous Liaisons. I practiced detachment.

I learned how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork into the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralist to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with. And in the end, I distilled everything to one wonderfully simple principle, win or die. That looks hard. Was there a reason that you felt you were, went through a pier where you were playing really scary people?

Did you feel like there was something about you that you were able to scare people, specifically men? No, you know, it's such fascinating. They just, they just came along at a certain time. I mean, I'd done fatal attraction and then, And then Dangerous Liaisons came up, but I don't think of them as evil. The only evil character I think I've ever played was Cruella. Thank you, Glenn, so much for being here. It is rather amusing, isn't it?

What is? Well, if we make this coat, it would be as if I were wearing your dog. Glenn Close, speaking with the New Yorker's Michael Shulman in 2017. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining us. Next time I'll talk about the Russia investigation and many other matters with Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Till then, stay in touch with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio.

And have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Lexus Quadrado. This episode was produced with help from Rhonda Sherman, David Ohana, Emily Mann, Cala Leah, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.