Getting Close to Stardom

By Dan Goodgame/Tucson

The difficult fiesta scene is finally accomplished, and the star takes a break on the parched and cactus-studded set. Her cheeks and shoulders are wholesomely freckled, her honey-blond hair cropped short and glowing in the desert sun. Dressed in simple cotton and sensible shoes, she looks like a handsome pioneer woman, which is essentially what she plays in her television movie now filming in Tucson.

Could this be the same Glenn Close who scared the lust right out of men's loins as Fatal Attraction's murderously obsessive Other Woman, the one in the wild curls and sexy scoop-front blouse whom a supermarket tabloid calls the "Most Hated Woman in America"? Yes and no. In her TV film, Stones for Ibarra, about an American couple who move to rural Mexico, Close, 40, returns to playing the sort of classy and controlled heroine that won her Academy Award nominations for three of her first four films, The World According to Garp, The Big Chill and The Natural. But after her stereotype-shattering performance as Alex, she will never be the same, professionally or personally.

Chatting in her trailer between scenes, Close expresses hunger for more roles like Alex, which she considers a breakthrough: "The first woman I've played who is out of control, who emotionally runs the gamut -- the first real, full-blooded role I've had." She adds that Attraction has also liberated her personal style. "Now I can wear that black leather jacket from the film, or those slinky, low-cut things," she laughs, "and feel really good about myself."

That laugh, a lusty guffaw about two sizes too large for her 120-lb. frame, is the first hint of something intriguingly unpredictable in Close. Similarly, the controlled expression on her high-cheekboned face often seems at odds with the light in her gray-green eyes. As her Attraction co-star Michael Douglas says, "she always looks like she has a secret."

That quality crackles through Close's eerily authentic portrayal of the lovelorn Alex Forrest and her descent into psychosis -- a progression about which Close knew much more than was in the script. Enlisting the help of three psychoanalysts, including her own, she constructed a detailed and clinically consistent history for Alex that helped her understand and project the character's pain and rage. She decided that someone like Alex probably was sexually abused by her father, despised by her mother and rejected by most of the men she had cared for. Her most recent affair was with a married man and ended traumatically, perhaps when she became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.

Reaction to the film indicates that the "whole male-female thing in this country is very volatile right now. I think many women are feeling used by men. They invest a lot in a relationship, in nurturing a man emotionally and in his career, but they have their own careers and emotions and they don't get that nurturing in return."

In her portrayal of Alex, Close says, "I drew on my own unhappy and vulnerable periods as a single career woman and from earlier times. I was never abused like Alex, but I've had times when I thought it would be easy to go crazy." For Close, most of those times came between an idyllic early childhood and her late-blooming film success.

A Connecticut Yankee born to one of the founding families of Greenwich, Close grew up among three siblings and innumerable ponies and dogs, roaming the family's wooded 250-acre estate. "I wasn't the oldest or the youngest or an only boy," Glenn recalls, "so I had to work harder to be noticed." One can see that in old family photos, where the other kids often are gazing into left field while Glennie is right up front, beaming an eager smile smack through the back of the camera. Precocious and poised, she proclaimed she was going to be an actress -- a career compromise reached only reluctantly at age five when she accepted that she could not grow up to be a quarter horse. Today she weeps with laughter as she recalls galloping on hands and knees, shouting defiantly to parents, "I'm still going to be a horse even after my breasts get big!"

Her "dark years," from seven to 22, are painful to discuss, and she has worked hard to overcome them. "We had wonderful parents and a wonderful childhood," she says tautly. "I only wish it hadn't ended when I was seven years old." In that year her parents joined a quasi-religious organization whose members were mostly affluent and conservative. "They wanted to save the world," says Glenn's younger sister Jessie. "In the process, this cult split up our family." The elder Closes moved to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), where Glenn's father, a physician, ran a clinic. The children were left in various boarding schools in Switzerland and Connecticut.

One friend at the Connecticut school, Screenwriter Sarah Kernochan, recalls that Close was "petrified at dances" and "terrified when the other girls would discuss sex." In school plays, however, she won the most demanding parts. "She would do anything as a performer."

After some adolescent wandering and college (William and Mary), Close moved to New York City and began acting with the Phoenix Theater Company. There she became fast friends with Actress Mary Beth Hurt, who recalls that Close's patrician reserve hid a "wild and playful" streak. Close's break was in the Broadway production of Barnum, which led to her being cast in Garp. One day she shocked the cast and crew after the production bogged down over a delicate nude scene in the boys' locker room. She suddenly stripped off her character's nurse uniform and streaked the cast and crew in an armor-like girdle and longline bra. "Everyone's jaw just dropped," says Hurt. "It was totally unexpected."

For all her humor, beauty and success, Close says she has found it "difficult to balance love and career." Her first marriage, at 21, to Rock Guitarist Cabot Wade, lasted three years, as did her second, to James Marlas, a Manhattan venture capitalist. The man in her life now is Producer John Starke, 37, who worked with her on Garp and is her partner in developing film projects. The two are expecting their first child in April or May. Unlike Alex but rather like her favorite heroine, Jenny Fields, the defiantly unwed mother of Garp, Close has no plans to marry.