Glenn Close

Glenn Close came to film late and from the theatre. She was thirty-five when The World According to Garp reached cinemas in 1982, having spent the seventies in repertory and on Broadway, and it brought an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress on her first attempt. The Big Chill followed in 1983 and The Natural in 1984, each producing another nomination in the same category. Three films, three nominations, and a public persona built almost entirely around decency and restraint.

Fatal Attraction in 1987 dismantled that persona in about two hours. Alex Forrest is a woman abandoned after a weekend affair who declines to go quietly, and the film was such a commercial event that the character has been used as a shorthand ever since, usually unkindly. It brought a first Best Actress nomination. Dangerous Liaisons the following year brought a second, for the Marquise de Merteuil - a part in which every line is a manoeuvre. Two nominations in two years, both losses, and the pattern was now set.

What the Academy kept declining to reward, everyone else did. She won the Tony for Best Actress in a Play for The Real Thing in 1984 and again for Death and the Maiden in 1992, then a third for Sunset Boulevard in 1995, that time in the musical category. A Primetime Emmy arrived in 1995 for Serving in Silence, and two more in 2008 and 2009 for Damages. By the mid-nineties she held three Tonys, and the Oscar count stood at five nominations and nothing.

The later nominations came in a different register: Albert Nobbs in 2012, The Wife in 2019, Hillbilly Elegy in 2021, the last of them for a performance in a film few people defended. That took her to eight, level with Peter O'Toole for the most competitive nominations by a performer who never won. In June 2026 the Academy announced an Honorary Award for her, to be presented at the Governors Awards in November. She is seventy-nine. The then-and-now question for Close was never about a face.