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Post by petrolino on Jul 30, 2018 17:23:07 GMT
Someone said Gary Oldman's old Dracula looks like her! LOL Glenn Close worked with Gary Oldman on 'Air Force One' (1997). They've been in touch since.
Janet McTeer, Gary Oldman & Glenn Close
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Post by petrolino on Jul 31, 2018 23:11:21 GMT
This week, Glenn Close has been speaking with journalist Christiane Amanpour in a half hour interview with Jonathan Pryce, her co-star in Swedish filmmaker Bjorn Runge's new drama 'The Wife' (2018) which is due for a nationwide U.S. release on 17th August. I watched the interview on CNN and I believe it might also be available to view through PBS.
"And, most extraordinarily, they're there when she tells me about her larger-than-life father, William Taliaferro Close, who spent years in Congo, at one point as Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko's personal physician, and who swept his daughter and family into a right-wing religious cult that gobbled up their lives. The cult's impact was so great, says Close, that for years "I wouldn't trust any of my instincts because [my beliefs] had all been dictated to me." ••• Close was 7 years old when her dad, a Harvard-educated doctor from a long line of New England blue bloods, joined the religious group known as the Moral Re-Armament. Founded during the late 1930s, the MRA held firmly to what it called "the four absolutes": honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. But these benevolent principles masked the all-consuming, all-controlling traits of any other cult — this particular one led by Rev. Frank Buchman, a violently anti-intellectual and possibly homophobic evangelical fundamentalist from Pennsylvania, who argued that only those with special guidance from God were without sin, and that they had a duty to change others. What began as an anti-war movement gradually turned into a possessive and exclusionary force. It is unclear how many adherents the MRA had, though about 30,000 people gathered to hear Buchman speak at the Hollywood Bowl in the late 1930s, and the group was widely discussed in the press during and after World War II. Its post-war conferences were attended by several high-level diplomats and politicians — despite allegations that Buchman had been a Hitler supporter — and its cultlike nature appears to have emerged only slowly. "I haven't made a study of groups like these," says Close, "but in order to have something like this coalesce, you have to have a leader. You have to have a leader who has some sort of ability to bring people together, and that's interesting to me because my memory of the man who founded it was this wizened old man with little glasses and a hooked nose, in a wheelchair." When her family joined the cult, Close was removed from everything she held most dear — above all, life in the ivy-covered, stone cottage on her grandfather's Connecticut estate, where she ran wild over the rugged land with her Shetland pony, Brownie. While Dr. Close went to Congo as a surgeon, she lived with her brother and two sisters at the group's headquarters in Caux, Switzerland. "They had a big hotel, a very glamorous, exclusive hotel called Mountain House, which I think is in one of Fitzgerald's novels," she recalls. "[They] made it into one of their world headquarters, and we stayed there for two years. When the mutiny broke out [Congolese soldiers rebelled in 1960, shortly after the country declared independence from Belgium], we didn't see our father for a whole year."
During the family's time in the MRA, "You basically weren't allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire," she says. "If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you're supposed to live and what you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to feel, from the time you're 7 till the time you're 22, it has a profound impact on you. It's something you have to [consciously overcome] because all of your trigger points are [wrong]."
- Stephen Galloway, The Hollywood Reporter
'Rare has a movie set in the early 1990s felt quite as timely as The Wife, which premiered on Thursday night at the Paley Center in Midtown Manhattan. The film, which is adapted from a 2003 Meg Wolitzer novel, is well positioned for the #MeToo era: It follows a few intense days in a marriage (a talented young woman abandons her ambitions to support her spouse and becomes—due to some bad advice, the unfortunate fact of the era in which she was born, and some internalized misogyny—the dutiful guardian of his legacy, rather than the architect of her own talent) and stars an irrepressibly excellent Glenn Close as the spouse of an acclaimed writer (played by Jonathan Pryce) during the days before he accepts the Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish director Bjorn Rünge directed the film and recalled at the screening the slightly unorthodox process of auditioning for his part in the production. “The producers said you must go to New York and eat breakfast with Glenn Close,” he recounted. “So I came to New York for the first time—this is only my second time in New York, now, and we talked about film, about theater, about life—and then she said: ‘I want you to direct this film.’” In direct contrast with the lopsided distribution of accolades depicted on-screen, each of the stars received due attention at the premiere: Pryce, not least for his recurring role on Game of Thrones, a starring one in Terry Gilliam‘s upcoming The Man Who Killed Don Quixote—oh, and “he‘s playing the Pope!” Close cheered. (That‘d be Pope Francis, in Fernando Meirelles‘ forthcoming feature film The Pope, due in November 2018). Not to mention the scene-stealing star turns in The Wife that came courtesy of Christian Slater and Annie Starke, both of whom were on hand at the screening and the intimate party at the Monkey Bar that followed and continued well into the evening.'
- Vogue Magazine attends the New York premiere of 'The Wife'
Bjorn Runge, Glenn Close, Christian Slater & Annie Starke
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