The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Close, Glenn
1947–, American actress, b. Greenwich, Conn. She began her career in the theater, debuting on Broadway in Love for Love (1974), winning an Obie for the off-Broadway The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1982) and a Tony for Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing (1984). She achieved immediate Hollywood success as the off-beat mother in The World According to Garp (1982) and went on to play a wise yuppie doctor in The Big Chill (1983), a bleachers muse in The Natural (1984), and various other largely wholesome parts. Close achieved international stardom in a chilling role, the obsessed and psychotic femme fatale of Fatal Attraction (1987). Her later characters have included the icy, depraved aristocrat of Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and the sharply witty newspaper executive of The Paper (1994). Close returned to Broadway in the drama Death and the Maiden (1992) and in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of Sunset Boulevard (1994), winning Tony Awards for both performances. She has also appeared in such films as as Jagged Edge (1985), Hamlet (1990), and Reversal of Fortune (1990), as well as in television dramas.
