Do we like Glenn Close?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record, no harm found and plenty of public speaking out, with one contested comment on trans casting and thinner evidence on her charity work.
Glenn Close was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1947 into an old-money family. Her parents joined Moral Re-Armament, a group with cult-like features, in 1954, and she grew up in it. At 13 the family moved to the Belgian Congo, and she split her time between Africa and Swiss boarding schools.
She toured with the singing group Up With People for four years and left at 22 to study drama and anthropology at William and Mary. She has talked on TODAY about leaning on her imagination as a kid in the commune. Stage came first, with Tonys for The Real Thing, Death and the Maiden and Sunset Boulevard.
Then the screen made her a household name: Oscar nominations for The World According to Garp, Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons. TV's Damages brought a Golden Globe and two Emmys.
On the harm check, we found nothing nasty. She has no court cases against her in anything we turned up, and no scandal. In 2018, when Scarlett Johansson's casting as a trans man in Rub & Tug sparked a row, Close said directors need to go out of their way to get trans actors jobs. She also said she believes “anyone should be able to play anyone”, a line some LGBTQ+ people will bristle at.
Politically she doesn't hold back. In January she said in a video she was “outraged and sickened” by what is happening under the Trump regime, and referred to the shooting of a Minneapolis nurse by ICE agents. In 2024 she posted a cat selfie on Instagram that appeared to be a swipe at JD Vance's “childless cat ladies” remarks, though she didn't name him. Where you land on that depends on whether you hear a brave elder statesperson or a celeb mouthing off, but it's her own opinion, openly given.
Recent work: she's in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, playing the sinister Capitol escort Drusilla Sickle, due in cinemas on 20 November. That's a mainstream studio franchise, and we found nothing in her recent projects to flag. The record on her charity work is thinner than we'd like, as the pages we could open didn't give dates we could cite.