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We all know that last year was the Year of Juicy Parts for Female Actors. Meryl Streep got not one but two juicy parts to play. Julianne Moore got not one but two juicy parts to play. Nicole Kidman only got one juicy part, but what a part: she got to play Virginia Woolf, as the lead in a screen adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's The Nose.
The trend has continued into the early part of 2003. The divine Frances McDormand is suddenly strutting about in leather pants, bedding younger men. Even Patricia Clarkson, so often overlooked, has had a taste of the meaty, Oscar-calibre roles in recent months.
And then, of course, there's Glenn Close. She's always been recognized as one of the finest female actors of her era. She's currently starring, along with Clarkson, in The Safety of Objects. And before that, she was...um, that evil lady with the crazy hair in that movie with all the dogs. And right after that, she got to play...er, that evil lady with the crazy hair in the sequel to that movie with all the dogs.
Now that we think of it, what was the last time Glenn Close had a really good film role? Let's scroll backwards through her résumé. Recently, she was in the TV movie version of South Pacific. Prior to that, she was in Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, which ended up as a TV movie. And in the 1999 animated version of Tarzan, she provided the voice for "Kala, Tarzan's Mother-Gorilla."
In fact, you have to go all the way back to -- yikes! -- 1990 for a truly great Glenn Close part. That year, she played Sunny Von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune. She narrated the film and did a wonderful job, especially considering her character was in a coma for the whole thing.
So how come Glenn Close isn't getting any juicy bones thrown her way? It's not like she can't handle them. She's still tearing it up on the stage, by all reports. And she's got a great film pedigree. For most, she'll always be remembered as the frizzy-haired, bunny-boiling, not-quite-dead-yet psycho in Fatal Attraction, way back in 1987. Before that, she made her name as the beatific, child-bearing Sarah in The Big Chill in 1983.
But she also rocked in Jagged Edge, The Natural, and 1990's Hamlet. And she rocked two times, with an encore, in 1988's Dangerous Liaisons. We can't decide which moment in that film was the most chilling: the knee-buckling wail she let out when she heard that John Malkovich had been gored, or that single tear that streamed down her cheek as she scoured the makeup from her face in the film's final shot.
But somehow, by design, coincidence, or plain bad luck, she got stuck in the '90s earning her keep as random Butch Authority Figures. Need a stern and powerful woman with a no-fuss haircut and a no-nonsense stare? Get Close on the phone. She played the Vice-President in Air Force One. She played the ball-busting editrix in Ron Howard's dopey The Paper. She played the (okay, not that butch) First Lady in Mars Attacks. In other news, she appeared as "Herself" in In & Out, Welcome to Hollywood, and Christopher Reeve: A Celebration of Hope. And she started doing a lot of voice work. And next thing you know: Kala, Tarzan's Mother-Gorilla.
Then she showed up with Donald Sutherland doing those bizarre intros and outros at the Academy Awards. How did her agent sell her on this glorified Vanna White gig? "Think of yourself as a kind of permanent presenter." No, think of yourself as Peter Coyote in a dress.
And so we say: what gives? And then we say: why not Glenn Close? We're not privy to the whispered conversations in Hollywood's halls of power. We have no idea why this has happened. For all we know, Close decided to (a) concentrate exclusively on her lauded theatrical career, (b) alienate everyone in sight, and/or (c) live out her days in glorious anonymity. If all this has been her choice, then more power to her. But if not, then more juicy roles to her. For crying out loud, if you've got juicy parts for Nicole Kidman, can't you spare one for Glenn Close?
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