Introducing The Dispatch, a new column by Derek C. Blasberg featuring a mix of interviews and reports from the front rows of the worlds of culture, art, and fashion.
On a balmy New York evening last spring, Ralph Lauren held his Fall/Holiday 2024 show at his Madison Avenue design studio. Leave it to Ralph to install country-clubby mahogany paneling and handsome leather upholstery in a modern, all-glass Manhattan office building. I was interviewing the legendary Glenn Close backstage, and I mentioned we were marking more than a half century of Ralph Lauren. “This September, I will have been a working actress for 50 years,” she replied wistfully. She put her hands up to make air quotes and smiled. “Thank God!” Then, transforming into Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond, she turned to the production folks filming our chat and asked if they could switch the cameras to highlight her good side (her right) and improve her lighting. “I’m sorry,” she implored, then declared, “Actually, no, I’m not.” Truly iconic.
But then, that’s Glenn. Her work has spanned five decades across stage and screen and has earned her three Tonys, three Emmys, and a trio of Golden Globe awards. (She’s been nominated for eight Oscars but has not won. Yet.) As a tween, I fell in love with her devilish and stylish Cruella de Vil in 1996’s 101 Dalmatians. In high school, I went to Blockbuster to rent her older films, like The Big Chill (1983) and Fatal Attraction (1987), to watch on my parents’ sofa on Friday nights and relish her dramatic range. (The term “bunny boiler” is still in the lexicon.) In 2017, I took my mom to see Glenn in Sunset Boulevard on Broadway for her birthday. We waited at the stage door for her to sign copies of Playbill—mother-gay-son bonding at its finest. Give this woman the lighting she deserves, people!
Months after Ralph’s show, I caught up with Glenn at Sydmonton Court, a grand English estate in Basingstoke and Deane. The owners? “The Lloyd Webbers,” she says, referring to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the mastermind behind megamusicals like Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and, of course, Sunset Boulevard. Glenn is in the U.K. filming Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery for Netflix. Her character in the film plays a church organ, so she and her host have been tickling the ivories together. “We went into all these different iterations and time changes, and we got carried away,” Glenn says (as my brain explodes). “My gosh, it was funny. We were cracking ourselves up.”
Glenn’s beloved dog, Pippy—or Sir Pippin of Beanfield, according to his Instagram—is curled up at her feet. (Netflix flew Pippy out from Glenn’s house in Bozeman, Montana, via Bark Air.) We discuss how so many of her performances have propelled important topics into the zeitgeist, touching on subjects like motherhood (1982’s The World According to Garp), sexual abuse (1984’s Something About Amelia), LGBTQ+ rights in the military (1995’s Serving in Silence), and gender (2011’s Albert Nobbs). Her most recent Oscar nom was for Hillbilly Elegy (2020), which became one of Netflix’s most streamed titles after the author of the 2016 memoir upon which it was based was selected to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee. (It was a wild July for VPs, of course. #TeamKamala over here!) In the movie, Glenn plays a fierce grandmother whose fury at the world fuels her support of her grandson.
The Power of Portraying Real Issues
What inspires her to take on these kinds of roles? About a decade ago, Glenn revealed that after spending the early part of her childhood on her grandfather’s farm in Connecticut, her family joined a religious organization called the Moral Re-Armament. The experience was hard for Glenn and her siblings. Leaving to study acting at the College of William & Mary in Virginia was her escape. “I think it has been easier for me to, in my imagination, create these characters than it is to figure out who I am,” she says. “That has made it something that I love. Maybe it’s because I have deep in me a sense of outrage still. Art is created out of a sense of outrage—any art that really sticks.”
Glenn says it took years for her to confront the feelings of shame she felt during her upbringing, which she now knows was a form of abuse. “I think you need to have an engine,” she explains. “It’s been difficult for my family to have gone through what we went through. We’ve all dealt with it in different ways, and we’ve all survived. But as someone who lived mostly in her imagination and in her head as a child, to be in a profession where I get to use that in my work, I feel incredible gratitude.”
Fashion's Impact on Performance
Fashion has played a big part in Glenn’s performances; she and I wonder if Jagged Edge (1985) isn’t the true origin of the power suit. Since 2017, her robust costume collection has been housed at a temperature-controlled, museum-quality facility at Indiana University. “I have such deep respect for the artistry,” she says of dressing the part. “I started collecting costumes because on movies, you spend hours in the fitting room. So my relationship with a costumer is as important as my relationship with a director.”
Glenn credits the legendary costume designer Ann Roth, who she worked with on Jagged Edge, as a mentor when it comes to understanding the art of clothing characters. Fun fact: That was Ann talking to Margot Robbie at the bus stop in last summer’s Barbie. Another fun fact: The intricate period costume Glenn’s character, the scheming Marquise de Merteuil, wears to the opera in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) was later worn by Madonna for a performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1990. “I got it back, and we restored it to what it originally was,” she says proudly. Last fun fact: Glenn chose to wear an Armani suit in her role in 1997’s Air Force One as America’s first female vice president—decades before we had one in real life—because Giorgio Armani, who has dressed her on numerous occasions, knows how to design clothes that convey strength and authority. “They did have a scene where she broke down and cried,” she recalls of the film. “I said, ‘I won’t do that.’ ”
The Importance of a Good Wig
“I love corsets,” Glenn tells me. “I love how they dictate how you move.” No, she’s not referring to Dangerous Liasons. (When I took a costume design course in college, we watched the first 11 minutes of the film because it’s a masterclass in period dressing.) Cruella’s black and white fur coat often overshadows the rest of the look. “Cruella had a 21-inch waist! And the boots were so painful–five inches tall!” she explains. “It was easy to tap into the character’s villainous rage.”
Glenn’s secret weapon to character development: wigs. Martial Corneville–“M-A-R-T-I-A-L,” Glenn exclaims–is the man who built her hair for 101 Dalmatians, Albert Nobbs, and Hillbilly Elegy. (Corneville received his own Oscar nomination for Albert Nobbs.) “It’s just all about the hair. A movie can be ruined for me because an actor is wearing a bad wig. Sometimes I see a movie and I see these actors in these horrendous wigs, and I think, ‘How can you look at yourself in the mirror and not do something about it?’”
I ask Glenn if she has found inhabiting the hearts and minds of these kinds of characters at all therapeutic. “I don’t like the idea of saying my craft is therapy, because I have such respect for the craft of acting,” she offers. “But I do think that, in my particular case, because I was in a cult from the ages of seven to 22, I went from college straight to my profession with a toolbox.”
The Room is Where It’s At
Scoping for Oscar bait has never been what drives her. “The only thing that bugs me is that people say, ‘You’re a loser,’ ” she says, invoking a phrase favored by a former president. “We have it so wrong in America in the way we talk about winners and losers. The thing that always means the most to me is I’m in the fucking room, and I’ve been in the room eight times, and there’s nothing like it,” she continues. “But it really is not foremost in my mind. How can you develop as a human being if you don’t take risks? Everybody in the room is a winner.”
Before we part, Glenn reminds me that true icons never stop being iconic. “I still feel just as motivated, just as excited, as I ever have,” she says, looking out on the expanse of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pristine manicured lawn. “In this profession, if you can survive it, you should only get better.”
