'Bunny-boiler' role saves marriages, says Close

Actress Glenn Close says her role as a psychotic man-eater in 'Fatal Attraction' has saved marriages.

Close played the vengeful, bunny-boiling "other woman" in the 1987 thriller who refuses to let her affair with the married man played by Michael Douglas come to an end.

The US star, now 60, told the Radio Times: "That movie struck a very, very raw nerve.

"Men still come up to me and say: 'You scared the s*** outta me.' Sometimes they say: 'You saved my marriage.'

"At the time, feminists hated the movie, and that was shocking to me.

"They felt they'd been betrayed because it was a single, working woman who was supposed to be the source of all evil. But now Alex (Close's character) is considered a heroine."

The blonde actress, who has married three times, now stars in US TV legal drama 'Damages'.

The '101 Dalmatians' star said that TV was now of better quality than film.

She said: "I was told, back in the '80s, that if I did television, it would kill my movie career.

"But I've always looked to people like Judi Dench and Helen Mirren who do both very successfully, and I go where the good writing is.

"Right now, the classy writing is being done for TV and that's because television knows how to treat writers.

"In film, writers are the bottom of the pile - they can get thrown off the set if the producer or director wants something very different from the original script."

In television, she added: "At least in the post-'Soprano's era, the writers are there from the first script to the last edit, so you have that integrity of vision.

"I think that American TV is now close to the BBC in its golden age, and that makes it a very, very exciting place to be," Close told the magazine.