Costume drama plays with gender

Glenn Close is tipped for an Oscar nomination for her role as an Irishwoman who dresses as a man to get work, says Helen Barlow

GLENN CLOSE first played Albert Nobbs on stage 29 years ago and since then wanted to turn the play into a movie. After a failed attempt with Istvan Szabo as director in 2000, five years ago she became co-producer and co-wrote the script with Irish author John Banville. She then hired director Rodrigo Garcia, with whom she collaborated on Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000) and Nine Lives (2005).

The character of Nobbs has changed. “Yes, I was a young Albert on stage,” the trim 64-year-old says. Her portrayal of an early 20th century woman who dresses as a man to work as a butler in a Dublin hotel looks set to garner her a sixth Oscar nomination.

“I think I have matured as an actress,” says Close. “It actually, probably made the character more poignant that she is older. She is more cemented into her existence and absolutely never thinks of anything other than that.”

Albert, who was abused as a child, is deluded into thinking that she can marry a woman (the money-hungry maid, Mia Wasikowka) and settle down. “Her passion is to protect herself with the money that she has saved up,” says Close. “That was her protection against the poverty and the brutality. She says people who live indecently are unbearable.”

But the film is fun — it turns the notion of gender in the Upstairs Downstairs scenario on its head. “There are scenes where you don’t really know what you are looking at. My favourite scene is with Hubert [Janet McTeer] and Kathleen [Bronagh Gallagher] in their kitchen and you forget they are two women. Gender actually becomes irrelevant and I think that is kind of subversive,” she says.

While Close admits to never having “put pen to bare page,” she enjoyed writing the screenplay, which is based on a short story by Irish writer George Moore. “I loved it. It was fun collaborating with John Banville and honing it for shooting with Rodrigo.”

Unfortunately, by the time the film’s financing came through, her intended co-stars, Orlando Bloom and Amanda Seyfried, had moved on to other movies. Now she appears alongside Aaron Johnson and Wasikowska.

Besides Garcia, she enlisted old friends for the film’s shooting in Dublin and Wicklow. Irish badboy Jonathan Rhys Meyers adds a lot of his King Henry VIII-style decadence as a partying hotel guest, Viscount Yarrell, while Close has long been friends with Pauline Collins, who plays the hotel’s owner.

We’ve seen less of Close in recent years because she had a daughter, Annie, 23, whom she raised alone. Close has been married three times. She used to joke that her portrayal of the bunny-boiling psycho Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987), and her scheming Marquise in Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988), did not help attract men. But her strict upbringing, as part of the Moral Re-Armament cult, which her well-heeled parents joined when she was seven, had a greater effect on her relationships. The experience made her rebellious and strong-willed. Her first marriage, to Cabot Wade (1979-1983), was associated with the cult, as she’d met and married the musician while on tour with her Up With People musical group. Her break from him was a chance to run wild.

Given Close’s contentment, it’s no coincidence that her career is flourishing once more. This has been fuelled in no small part by her astounding portrayal as the ball-busting litigation lawyer Patty Hewes in television’s Damages.

“No, I’m not like Patty,” she says softly. “I’m really not into confrontation at all.”

Close is currently filming the fifth, and probably final, season of the series, which has her come up against Ryan Philippe as a Julian Assange-style character. In Damages, too, Close has enlisted many of her old friends, including former boyfriends William Hurt, her co-star in The Big Chill, and Len Cariou, her partner during her rise to fame on Broadway. “Those were very wild times. We were young and it was crazy,” she says.

Now a second movie to which Close has long been attached will go ahead. The erotic thriller Therese Raquin will star another prominent awards contender, Elizabeth Olsen, as a young woman who’s pushed into an unhappy marriage by Close’s overbearing aunt.

Glenn Close. We’ve missed her.