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Surfing the web last night, I stumbled upon The Graham Norton Show. And there she was—Glenn Close—wearing a jacket with shoulder pads so colossal I half-expected her to take flight. Naturally, I thought: She must be promoting something. And indeed, she was. The movie is Wake Up Dead Man (2025): A Knives Out Mystery. It’s the third installment in the series, written and directed by Rian Johnson. It may be the best so far! But more of that below.
In the ruthless, backstabbing world of show business, Close has distinguished herself with acts that can only be described as soul-crushing—moments that could have ended another actor’s career before it even began.
The first came in 1984, when Close was in her late thirties – a late bloomer, she had been traveling the world performing song and dance numbers with Up with People. For reasons still shrouded in mystery, she agreed to dub Andie MacDowell’s southern-lilted voice in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. MacDowell herself was blissfully unaware of this betrayal until the film’s premiere, when Close’s voice emerged from her character’s mouth. Imagine the shock. That MacDowell managed to recover, rebuild, and carve out a career after such a public undermining is nothing short of astonishing. It must have taken an astronomical reserve of willpower and courage.
On July 12, 1993, Patti LuPone originated the stage role of Norma Desmond in the world premiere of Sunset Boulevard at London’s Adelphi Theatre—a part immortalized by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film. LuPone had signed an a supposedly iron-clad contract to carry the role to Broadway in 1994. Yet on December 9, 1993, Glenn Close opened the American premiere at the Shubert Theatre in Los Angeles. And for reasons still shrouded in mystery, it was Close—not LuPone—who transferred to Broadway, opening at the Minskoff Theatre on November 17, 1994.
LuPone, unlike Andie MacDowell in 1984, was already a formidable star. However, the humiliation of being sidelined was still enormous, and it must have taken an extraordinary reserve of willpower and courage to keep going. That Close never reached out to either MacDowell or LuPone during these episodes only rubbed salt into wounds already gaping.
Close’s own career began late but explosively. At 35, she made her film debut as Jenny Fields, Robin Williams’s mother, in George Roy Hill’s adaptation of John Irving’s The World According to Garp. It was a take-no-prisoners performance, and she arrived fully formed as a star. Many believe that had Jessica Lange not been nominated twice in 1982—for Tootsie and Frances—Close would have walked away with the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
Today, Close stands alongside the late Peter O’Toole as the most-nominated actor never to win, with eight nominations. Half of those are for Best Actress, half for Best Supporting Actress. Deborah Kerr remains the record-holder in the Best Actress category, with six nominations and no wins. Fittingly, it was Close who presented Kerr with her Honorary Oscar in 1994—one “big loser” to another. Richard Burton, too, died with seven nominations and no wins, while Amy Adams currently sits at zero-for-six, just one Supporting Actress nod shy of Thelma Ritter’s record. Close’s career is a paradox: both over-nominated and under-rewarded.
GLENN CLOSE – WHAT WAS AND WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN
| YEAR | MOVIE | NOMINATION | ACTUAL OUTCOME | WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN |
| 1982 | The World According to Garp | Nomination – Best Supporting Actress | Lost to Jessica Lange in Tootsie | Oscar WIN for Close |
| 1983 | The Big Chill | Nomination -Best Supporting Actress | Lost to Linda Hunt in The Year of Living Dangerously | UNDESERVED NOMINATION – so she cried in the shower, so what! |
| 1984 | The Natural | Nomination – Best Supporting Actress – | Lost to Peggy Ashcroft in A Passage to India | UNDESERVED NOMINATION – one of her worst performances – so Caleb Deschanel gave her a halo in the stands, so what! |
| 1987 | Fatal Attraction | Nomination – Best Actress | Lost to Cher in Moonlight | Oscar WIN for Close – she should have clearly won that year. Cher was good, but Close was amazing. |
| 1988 | Dangerous Liaisons | Nomination – Best Actress | Lost to Jody Foster in The Accused | Oscar WIN for Close – her most outstanding performance and one of the greatest performances of all-time. Right up there with Vivian Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire One of the great years with Close, Sigourney Weaver and Meryl Streep all in the running. Melanie Griffith and Foster gave lesser performances, but it was Foster’s year. |
| 1990 | Reversal of Fortune | For some insane reason, her magnificent work as Sunny von Bulow was overlooked | Not nominated | Oscar WIN for Close – The Oscars have a history of giving the award to someone who was unfairly robbed of an Oscar a few years previously, depriving that year’s deserving winner of their Oscar, so that the process repeats itself over and over. In 1988, Jeremy Irons should have WON the award for his astonishing portrayal of the fabulous Mantle Twins in Dead Ringers. He wasn’t even nominated. In 1990, he was clearly compensated for what was, at best, an average performance as Claus von Bulow. However, it was Close, as the ill-fated Sunny, who gave the best performance of the year and should have won Best Supporting Actress. |
| 2011 | Albert Nobbs | Nomination – Best Actress | Lost to Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady | UNDESERVED NOMINATION – as a woman pretending to be a man in late-19th-century Dublin, Close never developed a feel for the role and was totally outshone by Janet McTeer, who did. |
| 2017 | The Wife | Nomination – Best Actress | Lost to Olivia Coleman in The Favorite | UNDESERVED NOMINATION – average performance in a mediocre film. |
| 2020 | Hillbilly Elegy | Nomination – Best Supporting Actress | Lost to Yuh-Jung Youn in Minari | DESERVED NOMINATION – Close became only the third actor, after Amy Irving and James Coco, to earn both an Oscar nomination and a Golden Raspberry nomination for the same performance playing our current Vice President JD Vance’s Mamaw. In my opinion, she deserved the nomination, acting up a storm while chewing the scenery. |
By rights, she should already have three Oscars—two for Best Actress, one for Best Supporting Actress. Instead, she has none, which brings us back to her recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show and her promotion of Wake Up Dead Man. In it, she plays Martha Delacroix, a devout church lady who is equal parts Hitchcock’s Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson in Rebecca) and Mel Brooks’s Frau Blücher (Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein). Like Mrs. Danvers, Delacroix materializes rather than enters; her first appearance, looming behind Josh O’Connor’s Father Duplenticy (Johnson has a Dickensian flair for surnames), is a jolt for the ages – I shat my pants!
I predict this performance will earn Close a ninth Oscar nomination. Potentially record-breaking, yes—but only if she loses yet again. Which brings us back to Andie and Patti. Ever since Greystoke, and especially after the Sunset Boulevard debacle, I have disliked Glenn Close, even while remaining in awe of her talent. That, however, has never stopped me from voting according to merit.
As a BAFTA member, I did not vote for her in Albert Nobbs. Not out of spite, but because I simply didn’t think the performance was worthy—unlike Janet McTeer’s, who I did support. I don’t believe in voting for or against someone based on their personal life or past behavior—within limits, of course, though the question of where to draw that line is a thorny one. What I do reject outright is cancel culture. I don’t believe in removing Balthus paintings from museums because of his predilections, nor in boycotting A Streetcar Named Desire because Elia Kazan destroyed lives by informing for HUAC.
So, will I vote for Close this time? Perhaps. It depends entirely on the competition.
WAKE UP DEAD MAN IS CURRENTLY STREAMING ON NETFLIX.
