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PRINCETON: Actress Glenn Close talks about ‘Fatal Attraction’

Actress Glenn Close
On the key to playing
a psychotic character
Staff photo by Phil McAuliffeActress Glenn Close speaks at Princeton University on her career, family and the world of acting.
Close
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Samantha PergadiaSpecial Writer
   Alex Forrest, the bunny-boiling other woman in the 1987 film “Fatal Attraction” was not an easy character to love. But actress Glenn Close found it necessary to do just that.
   ”I just wanted to do the role justice,” Ms. Close told an audience at Princeton University on Thursday night, in a lecture titled “Are you who we think you are?”
   ”I’ve always felt that in order to truly commit to a character, I must love her,” she said. “Without love there’s judgment and if you’re judging you can’t understand.”
   Ms. Close said she sought to discover whether it was plausible for a woman to act in the ways Alex did. From psychologists, she learned that Alex’s psychotic behaviors — which included boiling a child’s pet rabbit — were typical of someone who has experienced incest at an early age.
   Still, Ms. Close said she never realized that the character would be come a source of fear to film audiences.
   The actress attributes her professional success to her early childhood years in Connecticut, which she remembers as a “seemingly endless summer.”
   ”We were outside from dawn to dusk, covering every inch of that property with our games, our imaginations, our hideouts and our little clubhouses,” Ms. Close said.
   Those childhood days of imaging and playing the roles of different characters are the reason acting has always come so naturally to her, she said.
   ”Actors must maintain a child’s appetite for mimicry, for demanding attention, and above all, for playing.”
   Ms. Close said that this world of childhood fantasy drastically changed when she was 7 and her parents were “seduced into a cult group” called Moral Re-Armament. Her “imagination turned inward” for the next 15 years as her family moved between a series of communal centers, trying to advance Moral Re-Armament’s mission.
   ”Some tough family gene kept me from totally surrendering,” Ms. Close said. At 22, she rebelled by going to the College of William & Mary.
   She described her self as an “ignorant, clueless” freshman who immediately sought out the college’s theater department and auditioned for “Twelfth Night,” winning the lead role.
   ”My passion and imagination had been ignited,” Ms. Close said.
   During her senior year, she landed her first professional job as an understudy with the Phoenix Theatre Company in New York. Her life took a “legendary turn” when director George Roy Hill sat in the audience of one of her performances, searching for an actress to play Jenny Field in his upcoming movie, “The World According to Garp.”
   ”Jenny Field was the first of a number of characters that I’d be asked to portray that totally intimidated me,” Ms. Close said. “Jenny would’ve eaten me for breakfast.”
   She received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal.
   Since Ms. Close had to wear makeup for Jenny Field that made her look significantly older, she was introduced to Hollywood as a woman incapable of appearing sexy, a hurdle that gave her agent difficulty when trying to obtain the role of Alex for Ms. Close.
   Ms. Close said that she felt “nervous and discombobulated” before her audition for “Fatal Attraction” and was especially intimidated when she walked into the audition room to see Michael Douglas. Ms. Close said during filming of the final scene, she would often call her father, who was a doctor, to ask about the plausibility of Forrest’s death, including whether it was realistic for her hand to twitch after she’d drowned.
   Ms. Close said that she was very committed to the original ending of “Fatal Attraction,” where Alex first attacks Dan with a kitchen knife and then kills herself. The scene was changed, however, after test audiences reacted unfavorably to it.
   ”I don’t think it would’ve become the blockbuster that it did if they hadn’t changed the ending — if they didn’t give the audience a sense of catharsis,” Ms. Close said. “It was only by killing Alex that order could be restored to the family. Americans like that. They like neat endings.”