Hollywood Reporter awards-season correspondent Scott Feinberg has posted a good audio interview with Albert Nobbs star-producer-cowriter Glenn Close. He reminds that Close collected five Oscar nominations in seven years (’82 to ’89) — a nomination tally matched only by Greer Garson, Bette Davis and Meryl Streep.
For me Close’s two best nominated performances were the psychopathic rabbit-killing witch in Fatal Attraction and the ultra-perverse schemer in Dangeorus Liasons. Followed by Jennie Fields in The World According to Garp, Kevin Kline‘s soulful wife in The Big Chill, and “the blonde in the bleachers” in The Natural.
“Most of our discussion, of course, centered around Albert Nobbs,” Feinberg notes. “The memorable way in which she first encountered the source material 29 years ago; what about it appealed to her enough to pursue a cinematic adaptation of it ever since; how she manipulated her voice, posture (she says Charlie Chaplin was a key model), and face (she switched from downcast to wide-eyed mid-film) to the extent that she could pass as a man,” etc.
Complaint: The subhead of Feinberg’s piece says “The 5-time Oscar nominee grants THR the first interview since her film premiered [at Telluride].” This implies that Close and her publicist David Pollick chose Feinberg and THR above all to speak to first. That’s not how it went down. Feinberg, yes, was technically the first guy to speak to her yesterday morning inside the Chuck Jones theatre lobby, but we were all there at the same time — Feinberg, myself, Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, Anne Thompson, etc. Stone and I spoke to Close after Feinberg finished, and then Tapley and Thompson. My short piece went up around 9 am LA time, Tapley’s a little bit before, and Feinberg’s posted at 2 pm.