Glenn Close, the actress who kept working through eight Oscar losses

Glenn Close

Photo: Georges Biard / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 19, 1947 Greenwich, Connecticut, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Guardians of the Galaxy, Tarzan, What Happened to Monday
Awards	3 Tony Award · 2 Emmy · Golden Globe · SAG Award

For almost half a century, awards season has treated Glenn Close as an arithmetic problem. Eight times the Academy has read her name among the nominees, and eight times the envelope held someone else’s. The figure follows her into every red-carpet interview. It also hides the more interesting fact about her career: in that same stretch she kept choosing the parts that actresses of her standing usually decline, the women who frighten an audience and the women who are the villain of somebody else’s story.

The roots of that appetite are unusual. When she was a small child her parents joined Moral Re-Armament, a Christian revival movement that moved the family into communal centres and decided, as Close has described it, what she wore and what she was allowed to say. She calls it a cult without hedging. She spent her late teens touring with its singing offshoot, Up With People, and married young in what she later called “kind of an arranged marriage”. Acting was the way out. She has said that her desire to be an actress saved her more than anything else.

Close, who was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on March 19, 1947, broke with the movement at 22 and enrolled at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, where she double-majored in theatre and anthropology and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Watching Katharine Hepburn on The Dick Cavett Show in her senior year settled what came next. Her Broadway debut arrived in 1974, in Hal Prince’s staging of Love for Love, and by 1980 she was the female lead of the musical Barnum.

George Roy Hill saw her on Broadway and cast her as Robin Williams‘s mother in The World According to Garp, even though she was only four years older than him. It was her first film and her first Oscar nomination. The second came for The Big Chill, a role Lawrence Kasdan had written with her in mind, and the third for a few minutes of backlit stillness in Robert Redford’s The Natural. All of them were warm, nurturing women. She has said the next part was the first to take her away from them.

That part was Alex Forrest, the book editor who refuses to be discarded in Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, the highest-grossing film in the world in 1987 and the source of the phrase “bunny boiler”. A year later she played the Marquise de Merteuil in Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons, running a campaign of seduction and ruin from behind a fan. The stage gave her three Tony Awards: for Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, for Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden and, in 1995, for Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard. Television followed the same line. Her ruthless litigator Patty Hewes in Damages earned two consecutive Emmys and led The New York Times to write that “there is no actor dead or alive as scary as a smiling Glenn Close”. As Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians, she brought the menace to the family audience.

The villain label is also where the standard account of her goes wrong. Close prepared Alex Forrest with psychiatrists and has said she never saw a monster, only a deeply disturbed woman. In the original ending Alex took her own life; after test audiences demanded punishment, the studio reshot a finale in which Anne Archer’s character shoots her, and Close fought the change before giving in. She was concussed during the reshoot and learned at the hospital that she was pregnant with her daughter. The film’s success turned a portrait of mental illness into the template for a decade of psycho-ex thrillers, a reading Close has spent years complicating; she later co-founded Bring Change to Mind, a campaign against the stigma around mental illness, in support of her sister Jessie, who has bipolar disorder. The Oscar story has a blind spot of its own. Her eighth nomination, for Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy, came alongside a Razzie nomination for the same performance, a double only two performers had drawn before her. That says less about the work than about how voters read a large, unvarnished performance inside a film they disliked.

Her other habit is patience. She won an Obie off-Broadway in 1982 as Albert Nobbs, a woman passing as a male servant in a Dublin hotel, and spent almost twenty years trying to bring the character to the screen; when Albert Nobbs finally arrived in 2011, she had co-written and produced it as well as starring. In 2016 she returned to Norma Desmond at the English National Opera in London and took the production to Broadway, where The New York Times called her performance “one of the great stage performances of this century”. The Wife, Björn Runge’s adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s novel about the spouse of a Nobel laureate, won her the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild award and the Critics’ Choice prize. At the Oscars she lost to Olivia Colman, and the arithmetic reached seven.

The past two years have been among the busiest of her career. She played the devout Martha Delacroix in Rian Johnson‘s Wake Up Dead Man, released by Netflix in December 2025, and Dina Standish in Ryan Murphy‘s All’s Fair, a Hulu legal drama led by Kim Kardashian that critics savaged and audiences watched anyway; its second season premiered on November 4, 2026. For Los Javis’ La bola negra, which premiered at Cannes and won the audience award at the London Film Festival, she accepted a part first conceived for a man, Isabelle Durand, an American scholar of Federico García Lorca, on the condition that she play it in Spanish. She learned her lines with a teacher from the Instituto Cervantes, as she had once learned Persian for Tehran on Apple TV+.

Close has been married three times and has one daughter, the actress Annie Starke, from her relationship with the producer John Starke; Starke played the young Joan Castleman in The Wife. In October 2026 Close explained on Instagram that she was walking with a cane after a full hip replacement.

The calendar ahead is crowded. On Sunday, November 15, the Academy presents her with an honorary Oscar at the 17th Governors Awards in Hollywood, alongside Ridley Scott and the Disney animator Floyd Norman; Peter O’Toole, the only other actor to reach eight nominations without a competitive win, received the same statuette in 2003. On November 20, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in US cinemas, with Close as Drusilla Sickle, the escort of District 12, opposite Billy Porter. A film of Sunset Boulevard with her as Norma Desmond has been in development for years without a start date. She has said she is not giving up on it, and nothing in her record suggests she will.