Glenn Close Interview

An early scene in the new TV series of Damages features an exchange between Glenn Close's character and a politician. "Girls today could learn something from you, Patty," he tells her smoothly. "You know how to wear a skirt." The real compliment, though, comes in his qualification: "But you're one of the boys. Always have been."

There has often been a touch of the masculine in Close's career. From Alex Forrest, the deranged siren of Fatal Attraction who seduced Michael Douglas with the very male fantasy of uncomplicated infidelity, then exacted a violent revenge, to the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, plotting to corrupt a young virgin for her own advantage, Close has played parts unencumbered by conventional feminine restraint. In Air Force One she played a tough vice-president - and even at her most comically camp, as Cruella de Vil, she was still a woman who would do anything to get what she wanted.

In Damages, Close plays Patty Hewes, a litigation lawyer not without humanity, but with a chilling willingness to compromise it to win a case, even if that means ordering the murder of her firm's young protege. Driven, chic, ruthlessly self-controlled, Hewes is a study in the moral fallibility of Manhattan ambition. If the casting seems almost impossibly perfect, it's because the part was written specifically for Close.

"It was their idea to explore what power does to people," Close explains. "That's what interested me. Because I think for a woman it's always a very, very tricky position to know how to maintain your power, in a world that's mostly dominated by men."

Close has maintained her power in Hollywood for more than a quarter of a century now. Her face has been familiar to us ever since she starred in the Big Chill in 1983, yet when she enters the room it comes as a shock, for the faintly mannish angles of her screen features are softened into a dewy, petite glow. She is quite extraordinarily beautiful. At 61 her appearance retains the same ageless quality that made it hard to say if she was in her 20s, 30s or 40s when she starred at 39 in Fatal Attraction. Sheathed in a black dress, with one elegant ankle curled behind the other, she settles on to the sofa looking almost regal, like Princess Michael of Kent. Close wouldn't look out of place at a Republican party gala - or, for that matter, an upscale Manhattan law firm.

Does she share any other traits with Patty Hewes? "Not that I know of." She laughs softly. "No, I'm not like Patty. I'm really not into confrontation at all."

She is, nonetheless, in many ways quite like a typical male interviewee. Questions are carefully parsed, and some answered with almost clinical precision. The poise doesn't lack warmth, but she is not what therapists would call a social rescuer; there is no impulse to fill the air with noise. Only the occasional twisting of a manicured finger, and the slightly watchful expression, suggest anything less than unshakeable self-possession.

When Close was first approached with the script for Damages, she had recently guest-starred in the TV drama The Shield on FX. The actor had told the channel, "If you ever come up with anything set on the east coast," where Close lives, "then come and talk to me." The pedigree of Damages was never in doubt; its team included writers from The Sopranos, "and I just thought it was an amazingly strong, powerful script". But I wonder whether, as a five times Oscar nominee and triple Tony winner, Close had any difficulty in transferring to the small screen.

"Well I found it very hard in the beginning, just because it is so different. You don't know your back story, you don't know how it's going to end, so you have to really trust the writers. I still don't know stuff about my character, because the writers want to keep their options open. They're writing in a way that means a lot of times you get so many last-minute revisions to the script that you have to learn to be very flexible, and you don't have as much time. It's got to the point where I don't even learn my lines until the day of shooting. You develop," she smiles dryly, "a very acute short-term memory.

"That's the first time I've ever worked like that, and I felt quite insecure about it at first, but now I think it's a very good acting process. It keeps you on your toes, and I love it. It's very intense, and you have to trust them, and just say, 'OK, what do you want me to do now?'"

William Hurt joined Damages for series two, but hated the pace of filming, and won't be involved in future series. Yet every year the number of Hollywood women competing for Emmys rather than Oscars seems to grow. Close refers half-jokingly to herself and others, including Holly Hunter and Sally Field, as "the sisterhood of TV drama divas", but it has been suggested that their transition to television owes less to professional preference than pragmatism. "We're seeing these actresses on television," the TV editor of Variety said recently, "because there aren't any decent parts in the feature world for them." Close readily agrees there aren't enough strong roles for older women: "That is a reality, there are nowhere near enough." But the notion of television as a consolation prize provokes a firm shake of the head.

"Oh no, I don't think so at all. I could do five movies and I would still take this role; it's an extraordinary role. I think the days when there was this big divide between movies and television no longer exists. You know, I think that view is a hold-over of the snobbery that people used to feel about TV. With Damages I was offered a part that was as good as anything I had read as a film script."

Close prefers to attribute the trend towards television not to gender, or ageing, but to technological progress. "Before, if someone missed an episode or two of this show they would have stopped watching because they couldn't catch up. But because of the way technology is changing, these days kids can watch TV on their iPhones. Now they can see those episodes, and that means that we can make what are almost mega-movies. And the narrative arc is extraordinary, with so much character development. With Damages we've made two series that you can almost watch back-to-back as one mega-movie."

For an actor who has played such fearlessly dangerous women, Close seems surprisingly wary of anything that could be construed as contentious. When I ask how she has had to operate to survive in an industry dominated by men, she replies quickly: "Oh, I would say the industry has definitely changed during my career. There are lots of powerful women in Hollywood now; it's really changed. I remember Dawn Steel [the head of production on Fatal Attraction]. She came in for a lot of censorship, by which I mean criticism, because she was very strong and very direct. It is that syndrome. Men and women like women who are a little bit more apologetic and feminine, rather than own their position and go for it. But in fact I think Hollywood might be one of those areas where things have really changed."

How does she account for her longevity, when so many other women have found themselves disappearing?

"I don't know. I'm good at what I do. In this crazy profession, everyone is lying if they say, 'I mapped out my career and every move is what I planned.' That's bullshit, that can never happen. You just make the best choices possible and suddenly you've done it for 30 years and your career is the sum of those choices."

Close's career began on the stage in New York in the mid-70s. In the early 80s each of her first three films - The World According To Garp, The Big Chill and The Natural - earned her an Oscar nomination, but it was Fatal Attraction in 1987 that defined Close as Hollywood's new mistress of complex and emotionally conflicted roles. Today, the movie remains one of the few, if only, films to have inspired a new phrase in the English language that neither derived from the title, nor was ever even uttered in the script. "Yes, I know," Close agrees, smiling. "I was talking to my hairstylist here, and she said that men here use the term bunny boiler all the time, even now."

In the past Close has described a certain pride when hearing the phrase. But over time it has come to be applied not just to female stalkers, but to women who show no more than mild interest in a member of the opposite sex. Does the vague misogyny implied by its popularity ever trouble her? She looks faintly surprised. "Well, I certainly don't take it personally."

Close has always been reluctant to describe herself as a feminist. "I've certainly never been the kind of person who wants to stand up on a soapbox and start shouting," she agrees cautiously. "And I've never been very comfortable with so-called celebrity political activism. The first time I ever went on a march it was a pro-choice march in Washington, but it was just after my daughter had been born, so I felt slightly differently about it then. I wore my daughter's pacifier [dummy] round my neck. But then they put me right at the front, and so I was there with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda." She laughs, and rolls her eyes. "And they were all going" - she imitates a roar, with raised fist - "and I was going" - and she pulls a sheepishly startled, what-am-I-doing-here? face.

But she was back there last month, joining the great crowd in Washington for President Obama's inauguration. "It was extraordinary, just amazing to be part of this huge, very solemn human mass moving together up the mall to witness this historic event." Had she voted for Obama in the primaries? "Well, of course, it was very difficult. We had the first female candidate, and we also had the first African-American. But yes, I did, because in the end it had to be about who I thought had the best chance of winning."

Close has been a committed Democrat for so long that her early political life is rarely mentioned these days. The daughter of a blue-blooded New England family, she grew up on a 500-acre estate, and was educated at boarding schools in Switzerland and Connecticut. Her surgeon father was a member of Moral Rearmament (MRA), an ultra-conservative pressure group that campaigned for family values, patriotism and anti-communism - and by the age of 17 Close had joined an MRA-supporting folk group. While liberal America was protesting against the Vietnam war and for civil rights, Close spent five years touring military bases, bolstering troop morale and even marrying the group's lead guitarist. Close has never elaborated on the personal or political epiphany she experienced at 22, but the pair divorced, she enrolled in drama school, and the chapter she has referred to as her "dark days" was left behind.

"I don't want to talk about that," she says as soon as I mention Moral Rearmament. "It's impossible, in an interview of this length." Even an oblique enquiry about her private self is crisply rebuffed; when I ask which role in her career she has most closely identified with, she replies: "What is that question? What I do for a living, my craft, is to create characters. It's not really about saying, 'This is like me.' I don't approach a character at all like that. As an actor I try to find where I can find some entrance into their humanity, but that's all."

Today she belongs to a small elite of actors whose fame has never been traded for privacy. Her personal life has not been uneventful; in the 80s she remarried briefly, to a venture capitalist, before becoming involved with the producer David Starke, by whom she had her only daughter, now 20. In the 90s she almost wed the head carpenter on the hit musical Sunset Boulevard, and three years ago she married for the third time, to her long-term boyfriend, David Shaw, a biotech entrepreneur. Yet her romances have never become the currency of celebrity culture coverage, and I wonder how she has managed this. She and her husband live in remote Maine, which probably helps, and she thinks the fact that she became a name relatively late, in her mid-30s, played a part in protecting her as well.

"But I just don't talk about things that are impossible - that are like a book. I just don't think it's important to my work that people know about my life. And I think it's very important in this crazy vociferous celebrity world that I keep me and my family as much out of it as possible."

The one aspect of her private life she is happy to bring to work are her dogs - a pair of West Highland white terrier crosses called Jake and Bill. The dogs can regularly be found just off camera on the set of Damages, and she and her husband run a website called Fetchdog.com, where Close blogs about her own and other famous people's pets. For a woman whose career has been distinguished by truly sensational acts of violence towards pets - not merely boiling a rabbit, but having a witness's dog murdered in Damages, and plotting an unthinkable fate for 101 Dalmatian puppies - there is a certain irony to her answer, when I ask what she would have done with her life had she not been an actor.

"Oh," she says quietly, "I think I would have done something in nature with animals."

(form the Guardian Newspaper, UK, Feb 15th 2009)