Glenn Close Wins the AARP Movies For Grownups Career Achievement Award

“It made me feel, and I think still feel, like I’m on the outside looking in,” she says reflectively.

Her passion for acting helped Close escape MRA’s hold. In 1970, she enrolled at the College of William & Mary in Virginia to study acting and anthropology.

“I never thought about acting in movies back then,” she says. Broadway beckoned first, but in 1980, when she was starring in the Broadway musical Barnum (for which she nabbed her first Tony nomination), she was spotted by the film director George Roy Hill. He cast Close in The World According to Garp (1981) in the role of Jenny Fields (mother of Robin Williams’ Garp) for her film debut.

“The hardest thing for me was where to put all my energy,” she says of the transition from theater to film. “I was used to creating spinning molecules from the stage to the back seats. And you have this bank of energy in your body which would blow out the camera if you had that on film.”

She figured it out. Her performance in Garp earned Close her first best supporting actress Oscar nod, and her career surged upward. Two of her next three films — The Big Chill (1983) and The Natural, a 1984 baseball drama costarring Robert Redford — brought two more Oscar nominations for best supporting actress.

In the middle of that heady Oscar boom, she took a risk and chose the serious, uncomfortable TV film Something About Amelia (1984), about family incest, as her next project.

“My agent said that would not be good for my movie career,” Close recalls. Not because of the storyline but because it was for television — something film actors weren’t doing at the time.

“Well, Judi Dench had been one of my great heroes,” she says, “and she’s done everything. She’s done comedy, she’s done television. So that to me is the way to do it. Just go with material you think is good.”

Three years later, Close’s terrifying turn in Fatal Attraction (1987) not only “scared the shit out of men” everywhere, as she puts it, but also brought her first best actress Oscar nomination. Over the next three decades she would go on to deliver startlingly good performances in film and on television in Damages, Albert Nobbs and Hillbilly Elegy. Three Emmys and four more Oscar nominations followed. She has still not won an Oscar. Again, she says it’s no big deal to her.

“I’d much rather be in the room again and again and again rather than win it once and never show up again,” she insists, “which has happened to quite a few people. The honor is to be with the people who are making the work that our audiences feel is worthy.”

Meanwhile her personal life has ebbed and flowed. She has been married three times and became a mother, at 41, to her daughter, Annie, in 1988. (Dad is film producer John Starke.)

“I weaned Annie at 7 weeks old when I went to film Dangerous Liaisons,” Close recalls. “She grew up on movie sets and onstage, in dressing rooms and theaters. She was always by people who loved her.”

Following her parents into the family business, Annie, 36, is an actress who hosts her own cooking show, The Mountain Kitchen, and costarred with Close in The Wife in 2017.

Close has revealed that she suffers from depression occasionally, and in 2010 — after her sister Jessie was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and her nephew with schizoaffective disorder — she cofounded a nonprofit, Bring Change to Mind, to help destigmatize mental illness.

“I do think people are more aware of the importance of mental health,” she says. “But we still don’t have the institutions to get people the help they need to get better and then stay well.”

While Close has gathered her family close in Montana, she also believes in giving people, including herself, space. After her marriages and several long-term partners, she’s currently single, and that’s just fine.

“Katharine Hepburn said something like, ‘Men and women should live next to each other and visit every now and then,’ ” she says with a laugh.

Throughout her career, Close has wanted to please audiences ... and sometimes startle them. The buzz in the news the day we chat is her latest role as a Satan-fighting grandma in the horror flick The Deliverance, and a nasty line she spits out while thrashing about, demonically possessed.

“It shocked everyone?” she asks of her character’s reference to a female body part. “I’m glad!”

But Close’s gaze is on the horizon. One of her upcoming film roles — Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard — is already one of her favorites, before production has even begun. She first played the tragic, once famous, now-fading actress on Broadway 30 years ago, won a Tony, and reprised it in 2016 and 2017.

“Norma Desmond is like Hamlet, as far as I’m concerned,” says Close. “She’s one of the greatest roles ever written for a woman.”

Unlike Desmond, though, Close has no intention of fading away.

“It’s ironic that now, at 77, I’m getting the best roles of my life,” she says. “I’m incredibly lucky to make a career out of something that I have so much love for. It’s a maddening profession. But I’m having the time of my life.”

Our picnic at an end, Close scans the clearing sky and the land and mountains before her. She points to three twisted apple trees dotted with red.

“I call them the Sisters,” she says. “They were planted by the first homesteaders here in the mid- to late 1800s. They still bear fruit, which is a miracle, because they’ve been ravaged by bears over the years and are practically hollow.”

Gardens, chaos and survival.

The actress tosses Pip half of her uneaten donut, excuses herself and disappears into a weather-beaten barn.

She’s got chores to do before sundown.